The journey of consciousness: departure
When they were young, my kids were given a book called We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. The text is by Michael Rosen, with joyous, sensitive illustrations by Helen Oxenbury.
I told my kids this morning I was writing a post about this book, and would they like me to read it to them again. Both came tumbling over and cuddled in, including my thirteen-year-old son, who said it was one of his favourite books.
Thanks Lucette, wherever you are, who first gave us this book, and who had it read to her when young.
It’s the story of a family - a Dad and his kids, and the family dog - who decide to go on a bear hunt. As they journey, they encounter various landscapes - long wavy grass, a deep cold river, thick oozy mud, a big dark forest…
In all circumstances,
My son seemed to know why I was going to write a post about this book. It’s because of that message, We can’t go over it, isn’t it?
We read the book together, my daughter with the loudest voice.
Then I asked my son: What do those lines, We can’t go over it…, mean to you?
It’s a bit like cricket, if you go forward to meet the ball, or lean back….When you’re facing a new situation in life “going over it” means you think you’re too good, or the issue isn’t important or relevant. “Going under it” means you're trying to avoid it. You have to face it - “go through it" - and learn.
Wow, Arlo. That’s pretty good. (I’m still thinking about the cricket analogy).
One of the things we all go through is growth or change - the growth of our bodies, but also the growth of our minds, and, as some writers and mystics have been saying for a long time, the growth of our consciousness (our capacity to consent to, realize, and perhaps even understand, to some extent, a greater fullness of spirit and soul).
The body bit is hard to avoid: babies become toddlers, my son has just become a teenager. At thirty-ish, my body began to thicken and change from a tender sapling into a barrel-y oak.
Sometimes our minds are in denial about these physical changes. That’s very painful. Tomorrow I will go to the hot pools near the mountains with my kids, and fully - courage, dear heart - embrace my thickened oak trunk.
The idea that human beings move through distinct, sequential stages of life has, of course, been with us for a very long time.
In the painting below, The Stages of Life (1835), by Caspar David Friedrich, we see an old man, a middle-aged couple, and two young children - three figures, or groups of figures, representing various stages of life - beside an open sea. Beyond them, five vessels are sailing forth - a boat for each person - or perhaps some boats are coming into shore.
Is the old man here to say goodbye? Has someone already departed? Is one of the ships going to take the young family away?
Perhaps they’ve already left, in a sense, and we’re left with the ‘ghost’ of their departure, their lingering final goodbye.
The father turns back, perhaps to his father, as if to say: It’s ok, you don’t have to come any further. Or: Please don’t come any further!
When I was young, in my early twenties, I thought that one of the ships was coming to take the old man away, to the life and world beyond. But now it feels like the family is departing, leaving ‘the Old World’ and Old Father behind. Either way, there’s a doubleness of emotion - the poignancy of parting, loss, and goodbye, but also the excitement of the new, of the spirit or consciousness moving forward, towards an unknown, beckoning horizon.
Today, in terms of my spiritual journey, I am at a point of leaving one “stage” behind and moving, or waking up further, into/within another “stage”. But, as we will see in future posts, it’s messy.
Gazing at Friederich’s Stages of Life, I’m with how my transition involves a certain experience of loneliness. It’s not so much that I’m physically leaving, or will no longer have physical contact with certain individuals or groups, it’s more, I think, that we might understand each other less, share fewer interests, ‘spiritual excitement’ and common ground, and, yes, perhaps less physical togetherness too. A part of me feels sad.
