Winter: There Are No Instructions
You have come to the shore.
There are no instructions.
-Denise Levertov
Winter has asked us to let go down to the bones.
What did we expect from a season of decomposition? Enlightenment? Clarity? Renewal?
Death is not so obliged to reveal anything to us. In fact, she leaves us in the dark. With no instructions. At the shore of a vast ocean we know not how to navigate, let alone take a first step.
Here we are. The last weeks of winter before spring quickens in the womb of the earth around February 1st.
There is no enlightenment here at the end of a cycle. And that is the gift. We don’t know who we are nor who we’re supposed to be. What a relief. Nothing to define. Nothing to explain. Nothing to prove.
In these last weeks of winter, I’ll continue to decompose—to fully wring out the weight of limiting beliefs, making space for all the possibilities. There is no manual, no step-by-step guide to live a life fully satisfied.
Day by day, moment by moment, life happens. How strange and beautiful it is.
Instructions. There are no instructions. But I grew up on manuals. Step-by-step, how to live for eternity with Heavenly Father and my family happily ever after. Forever and ever, if I lived a life of obedience—if I passed the test. If I was disciplined and mastered my sinful self.
As a young child I sang, “Teach me all that I must do, to live with Him someday.” Like my mother, I was convinced that I was far from worthy to enter the Kingdom of God. I spent most of my life following manuals created by men with “priesthood authority.” They told me exactly what to do. The instructions were clear.
And if I wasn’t feeling happy or loved or enlightened—it was my fault. I wasn’t following the instructions well enough.
And so it is that I feel the same about any instruction manual—any guide or how-to instructions. Get in shape? Here’s the how-to! And if you don’t get toned like the people in the manual, it’s your own fault—you weren’t following the instructions well enough. You weren’t disciplined enough—you weren’t obedient enough.
Get a good-paying job: here’s how to get to the top! Sacrifice your relationships, your health, your pleasure. After all, pleasure is for the weak! Self-mastery has nothing to do with pleasure. In fact, self-mastery implies we are “slaves” to our pleasure.
Instructions seem to be merely a way for all of us to judge ourselves and each other unfairly. When we don’t get the promised “results,” it’s our own fault. Never mind that we live in a culture that lives in denial of our animal nature. Never mind that we are depressed, anxious, and stressed out because to live authentically is to, most likely, live a simple life of day-to-day sustenance—hardly our modern America’s definition of success.
These days I do still find wisdom in this poetic Bible passage:
And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon [a king] in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
In her book Why We Need To Be Wild, Jessica Carew Kraft talks about the difference between “immediate return” societies, where “if [the] deer hunt is successful or if they harvest from a fig tree, the whole group will share the food right away,” compared to our “delayed-return lifestyle” where we accumulate not only wealth but also “poverty, chronic disease, violence, and environmental degradation” to secure our comfortable and high-tech lifestyles.
Delayed gratification. We’re religious about it in our Puritan, hard-work society. Instructions tell us how we’re weak humans who can’t trust our desires, instincts, and intuition. Stick to the plan to pass the test—stick to the instructions.
What I learned from my 33 years of religious living, is that the instructions don’t work. I got really good at denial—pretending that the instructions were making me happy, motivated, ambitious, and righteous. Oh how my heart was breaking. The more unhappy I became, the more I leaned into my intellectual head. It was all supposed to be working—why wasn’t it working?
You have come to the shore. There are no instructions.
Like Venus, born from the sacred foam of the ocean, we too come to the shore Beautiful and full of Love. May we trust our longings, desires, and intuition. May we throw out the manuals, the how-to’s, the step-by-steps, expert advice, scientific measurements.
I want a life of rhythm, presence, and absolute wonder. I will most likely not acquire any kind of wealth, but I will have enough, like the lilies of the field, day by day. Immediate and tangible. Breath by breath, my intuition will strengthen and my awe will abide.
