Lose, Love, Live. Dan Moseley
who practice spiritual disciplines know that emptiness and loss are the womb for rebirth. They discipline themselves to create silence—space empty of words—in which their hearing is sharpened to hear more. In the closing of their eyes to the bright light of sight, they see what can only be seen in the dark. In the fasting from food, they experience the nourishment that comes from a hungry body. When they give alms, they learn that true wealth comes from an empty space in the wallet. When they offer hospitality, they discover the gifts of strangers who now have space in the empty chair at the table. Spiritual growth is about loss and emptiness. It is the result of space that is created when what we have trusted to hold us is not present.
Death and Rebirth
In my childhood home, words were sovereign. They were fed to me with my mother’s milk. I learned to relish them and to trust them. As I learned to speak, my parents constantly reminded me how to speak correctly. They taught me that there are words that build up and words that tear down. If I used words that tore down (telling my brother he was “stupid,” for instance), I paid a high price. If I used words that my mother felt demeaned the human enterprise (like “damn” or “hell”), I was required to go pick my own switch and roll up my pant legs. I became a student, and spoken and printed words fed my mind. I became a singer, and poetic words dressed in notes became my soul’s food.
After the series of deaths and losses that invaded my life over a decade ago, however, words died for me. They lost their power. I lost my voice. I realized that words are like dust—cast to the wind and scattered, seldom having the lasting effect one desires.
The result was my inability to read or write. I lost the focus necessary to follow a sentence across the page and hold its meaning in my mind. I tried writing but could not develop any confidence in it.
When I spoke in public, I felt tentative—stumbling and qualifying. I came to realize that the mind in chaos has a hard time taking words into itself and ordering them into any sense. Because my mind couldn’t process the way it was accustomed to, I discovered I was much more in touch with my body and my soul. My heart was also confused, and I couldn’t stay in relationships very well. I realized these losses had effectively driven me out of my mind and into my body, out of my heart and into my soul.
After several years of struggle, I was surprised by a realization that freed me to put these words down on a page and send them out to others in a book. One crisp fall day, I was hiking in the forest that has become my playground and sat on a bench looking at what I call the broccoli tree. (It looks like a hundred-foot stalk of broccoli.) As the last of the late-autumn leaves drifted to the ground, I had a deep sense of sadness. I realized the words I had spoken most of my life were much like the fallen leaves. My words had fallen from my lips and turned brown. The smell of decay was in the air. Most of the words by which I had made my living had long ago disintegrated. They were not remembered, nor were they framed and put on a wall.
As I pondered this process, I settled into a deep sense of contentment. Yes, the leaves fall and die. Yes, the words fall on people’s ears and die. The decaying leaves become the humus that nourishes the tree and becomes the fertile home for the gestation of new seedlings. Maybe that is what words do—they are not to live forever. They are simply designed to fall and die and silently and perpetually fertilize the new life that emerges from the earth.
As I came to this understanding, I was released from my block and decided I could write again. Then as I was relaxing in the crisp fall sun, an acorn fell and struck me right on top of my head. All the fluttering, descending leaves had spoken so gently and then suddenly, one hard little acorn dropped from nowhere and made its point. Only a few words make an impact. The rest do their work of decay and death, becoming humus for the nurturing of new life.
This book is intended to be both brown leaves and hard acorns. It is a result of the journey from trust and confidence in the life I had been given, the collapse of that life, and the emergence of new life and understanding.
In this book you will be invited to explore ten dimensions of reality we experience as we learn to embrace the new and leave the old. You will be encouraged to explore your suffering and open yourself to rebirth as the gift that comes to those who pay attention to their lives and who have the courage and patience to discover the gifts that are a part of losing, loving, and living.
As the ten dimensions of experience common to loss are identified, you are invited to recognize them in your own journey, to attend to your feelings and your thoughts as you experience them. I encourage you to slow down and explore the gifts that come through these experiences. (“A Discovery Journal” at the end of this book will help you write your way through your loss and into new life.) I believe that when you work your way through your loss in this way, you will find new parts of yourself and new resources for living a rich and vital life in the future.
In this book we will also identify persons who might be companions for your journey. When Jesus came face-to-face with his own death, he took some friends to the garden with him when he prayed. He knew that the journey through suffering and death to new life is not one that should be taken alone. As you explore your loss and hope for new life, you will want to seek out friends who can walk with you. You need several. No one person can be all things to you. Sometimes you need intimate friends; sometimes you need strangers. I have discovered that the presence of multiple companions helps us to live these experiences more fully and to discover new parts of ourselves that we might miss were we to walk alone. When you walk with others through these experiences, you can help them grow in spirit and life if you attend to some of these ways of being present with them.
Welcome to the journey. Welcome to the pilgrimage. Welcome to the discovery of life.
So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal
of the field and every bird of the air,
and brought them to the man to see what he would call them;
and whatever the man called every living creature,
that was its name.
GENESIS 2:19
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