‘Beautiful Baby, Beautiful Child’: Song #9 from the Boundless soundtrack

You can do the True Self no harm. Know that there is great power in walking into the next phase of life with this knowledge embedded in you ahead of time.

Dec 29, 2024

In BOUNDLESS, my newly published memoir, I draw from the wisdom of American poet laureate Joy Harjo and spiritual teacher Father Richard Rohr.

As the mother of a son and a woman who led a feminist magazine for 16 years, I might have had a few aspirations about what it meant to usher a boy into manhood.

Once I wrote a column for Sage magazine in which I said, because he was arriving at the same cosmic moment as his twin sister, I had a gender equality experiment going on in my womb.

What if two souls arrived at more or less the same time, only 45 seconds between them and only 1 ounce difference in their weight?

Would they then have the same opportunities?

What I knew, because it was my job to write aspirationally for women, was that while it was still a hard world for girls, it was getting harder for boys, too. That’s because our culture still puts them in the man-box. Part of becoming a man is letting the culture do its work on you: Be prepared for battle and don’t have feelings.

A Desert Vision Quest That Never Happened

In BOUNDLESS, as I’m driving to Arizona to settle my son into his dorm room at Arizona State University, I lament that there is no ritual in our dominant culture for a passage to manhood. He and his father have traveled ahead of me across Navajo and Hopi land, where such a thing does exist.

EXCERPT from BOUNDLESS
With his father tonight, Paul was driving across Navajo and Hopi land where other young men had gone before, fasted for days, sweated in lodges, let themselves be filled with the bright sadness that connects us with the sadness of all beings.

This idea of the “bright sadness” stirs me. Something transmutes in you when you feel connected with all beings and let the bright sadness permeate your soul. Allowing yourself to feel the brightness of being alongside the sadness of being, leaves you with compassion for all beings—including your own self, which may be the hardest task of all.

You learn how to be with all of your inner turmoil. You let it arise, be there and walk on out ahead of you. Because that turmoil is not you. What is you is the witness, the one who is noticing the tumult, having compassion for it and not taking the ride with it. You remain in the seat of consciousness.

EXCERPT from BOUNDLESS
In any other culture, any other time, my son would experience a rite of passage, a series of tests of his character, a wise elder to instruct him, and a ceremony with fire and sage to make it so. With the ancient mysteries gamboling through his head, my son would walk alone into the desert under a blanket of stars to a bare, jagged rock and spread a wool blanket in the sand. He would build a fire in a pit of lava rock. He would wait in the desert for what seemed like a thousand years until the Eternal Desolation found him. He would experience the immensity of what he was to become and be struck with a dagger of insight that this could never be borne alone. He would realize that I am not fucking stupid.
In the endless stretch of sunbaked days, perhaps aided with peyote, he would see visions of hero warriors who have gone before him, and spirit animals would come to walk beside him. He would face his shadow and stand in his powerlessness. He would face God and death head-on—ahead of time, ahead of life—so he would know for himself that he could do his True Self no harm. Where he had thought he would be alone, he would find his way to be with all the world.
None of this happened.

Male Rites of Passage

I wanted this for my beautiful child, much as American poet and musician Joy Harjo sings in today’s song from the BOUNDLESS soundtrack. A member of the Muscogee Nation, she served as U.S. poet laureate for three terms from 2019 to 2022.

In BOUNDLESS, one of my pivotal decisions is to enter The Living School, a two-year spiritual study that teaches Christian contemplative wisdom from the perennial tradition and grounds you in practices that support transformation and inspire loving action. This teaching about anchoring our dwelling in the True Self is informed by the teachings of Thomas Merton and amplified by the teachings of Father Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation and The Living School.

For many years, Rohr has been a voice for healthy male spirituality. In 2012, he founded Illuman, a spiritual movement that helps men deepen their connection with themselves, each other and the world they wish to see. The program helps men transcend the man-box and become a fuller and more expressed version of their masculinity. Illuman offers rites of passage for men.

By the time I have arrived to settle my son in his dorm room in Tempe, Arizona, and my daughter in her dorm room in Denver, I have encountered my own Desert Vision Quest. Rohr says it is only through great love and great suffering that we come to the essence of our soul, to know God. And yes, I had encountered both. In doing so, I had shed my False Self and found my True Self.

Here is how Rohr defines the True Self: “The True Self is precisely the divine part of you that is great enough, deep enough, gracious enough to fully accept the human part of you. If you are merely human, you will tend to reject your embarrassingly limited humanity.”

Encountering the Bright Sadness

When you let yourself encounter the bright sadness, something within you takes another form when you stop and still yourself and let the Eternal Desolation finally find you. I’d been running from it. In Saratoga, it had finally found me. And it had done me no harm. It had transformed me.

When at last you let it chase you down, you feel the full immensity and power of life. Then you know it can never be borne alone.

This places you in a rarefied space. You have faced God and death. You have let the False Self fall away. You come into an abiding awareness with the indwelling self, the one that is conscious, the one that is true. You know that you can do the True Self no harm. There is great power in walking into life with this knowledge ahead of time.

The bright sadness can be thought of as a deeper lightness. It is the ability to hold great joy and suffering. It is an abiding contentment, a sober happiness. It doesn’t fleet. It doesn’t fluctuate. Arriving there, you can love more deeply and live more lightly.

That was my wish for my twins as they entered adulthood. And it is my wish for you, no matter which chapter of adulthood you are entering now.

“I can hear the sizzle of newborn stars, and know anything of meaning, of the ﬁerce magic emerging here. I am witness to ﬂexible eternity, the evolving past, and I know we will live forever, as dust or breath in the face of stars, in the shifting pattern of winds.”
― Joy Harjo, Secrets from the Center of the World (Volume 17)