‘The human comedy doesn’t attract me enough. I am not entirely of this world….I am from elsewhere. And it is worth finding this elsewhere beyond the walls. But where is it?’
The pull of elsewhere has dominated my life. As a child, lying tucked up cosy and warm in bed, listening to the wind beyond our walls tearing the world apart, I used to luxuriate in the contrast between in here and out there – and wonder where the Power came from to cause the winds to rage, and the sea to beat endlessly against the coastline of my native island.
It would take me a long time beyond childhood to understand and accept that my obsession with the big “Why?”, from the moment I opened my eyes to the world, is not the norm for most of humanity. Sensibly, they just want a quiet uncomplicated life.
Apart from my maternal grandfather, a loving and very broad-minded Christian – ‘remember, child: whatever our race, colour or creed we are all God’s children’ – nobody knew what went on in my head and heart throughout my entire childhood.
There is no such thing as one biography of a life.
Your perspective changes with the passage of time and the way life’s inevitable challenges are dealt with. You rewrite your own history in your head all the time, mostly without realising it. For example, I never understood the full extent of elsewhere’s pull until my mid-life descent into and return from the Underworld, a period which lasted seven years – undoubtedly the most difficult and the richest time of my whole life. I feel in better relation now to that mysterious elsewhere than ever before.
To me, elsewhere is the vast wave of which everything – universe, cosmos, galaxies, planets, Earth, all life forms – is a droplet. We arise from elsewhere, and that is where we return. Call it the quantum vacuum, the Zero Point Field, God, Buddha, Krishna, the Ground of our being, the Source, the One: the name we give it does not matter.
I have also learned that elsewhere is not somewhere else. It is here, present, now, everywhere – always.
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(headline quote is from Eugene Ionesco:quoted in Philip Yancey’s “Reaching for the Invisible God” p25)
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400 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2013
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page
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I think rather than saying “There’s no one biography of a life”, I might say, “Our biography includes a multitude of lives”. When I think about it, I can identify six distinct “lifetimes” I’ve lived or am living, some so utterly distinct from the others it’s really quite remarkable.
I’m too distracted these days to really think it through, but it also seems to me that there are two ways of approaching the questions of life. Some begin with the questions and seek answers through the world. Others (like me) begin with the world, and dig around to see what questions I can unearth!
Lovely, thought-provoking post that I’ve bookmarked for further re-reads and thoughts.
We are about to embark on the task of erecting and decorating our 9 foot Xmas tree with the usual attendant melodrama, so distraction is my dominant mind set this morning! But re one’s approach to the Questions of Life – I think I came in on the big Why?and that the answers and questions have been woven together ever since. But the Why? always predominates: how can any of us, even the reductionists, ever know why we are here and what we are for….