Yesterday, the NY Times had an article about a man who started something called the Cloud Appreciation Society. He'd been spending some time in Rome and as he looked at frescoes and religious paintings he noticed they were filled with clouds, masses of the soft billowing kind, but outside the Roman sky usually had very few clouds.
He was in Rome because he needed time off from publishing a magazine in London called "The Idler." He called it "literature for loafers" and advocated aimlessness, letting the imagination wander. In Rome, he thought about the clouds in the paintings and the cloudless sky and just got interested.
Back in London, he began a detailed study of clouds and talked to everyone about them. Eventually, a friend invited him to give a lecture and, in trying to come up with an alluring title, he called it "The Inaugural Lecture of the Cloud Appreciation Society." The lecture room was packed and afterwards people asked him how they could join the Society. He had to admit there wasn't one but soon fixed that. He created a website where people can post photos of clouds, trade information and, in exchange for $15, get a membership badge and certificate. There are now 40,000 members from all around the world. He's written a book about clouds that's been a great success and now his life is all about clouds.
There are so many reasons to love this story. A deep interest and passionate study of what is possibly the most ephemeral thing in Nature, never fixed, always changing. The fact that this man noticed clouds and wanted to know about them. He didn't second guess himself or wonder what other people would say about his eccentric interest. He just went with it and a world of science, art and literature, not to mention people, opened up to him. Who could have predicted how far the simple act of noticing clouds would take him? Or that people all around the world would share his interest?
Unpredictability. We think we know where things are going or how all our efforts will turn out. Things, disappointing things we couldn't have predicted often come to pass and this is such a common occurrence there are common phrases for it: Man proposes and God disposes. Or from John Lennon: life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. We don't always get what we want. But this man's story shows that the opposite is also true. You don't know where things will lead and sometimes the unpredictable is a welcome surprise, even better than what you thought you wanted.
I can see that for me the challenge is to move forward without judgment or self-censorship, to allow myself to go wherever spirit leads me. I can stop being certain of the outcome of what I do. I can think of the unpredictable, even when it's something I wish hadn't happened, as simply a new set of circumstances to embrace and learn what I can. I can't be without opinion or desire but I can let things take their course and be all right no matter what.
What a rich world the cloud man created; he found it because nothing was holding him back.
Yesterday, an opportunity to send my work out into the world came up. I felt a familiar flicker of excitement, but it was short lived - immediately an even more familiar voice said, no, that will never work, no point in even trying.
It was only in talking to a friend a few hours later that I realized what I had done. I had deflected a good possibility before I even explored it by allowing the voice of self-censorship to be the loudest voice I heard. I saw the pattern I've repeated so many times - an idea or opportunity arises and I deflect, squash, allow it to pass. It's as if there are templates inside me and when things present themselves I automatically sort them - in this case, opportunity went into the I-always-deflect template.
Telling my friend put the possibility out into the world, instead of leaving it in my head where it could have drifted for days until it disappeared. We quickly made a step by step plan of what I could do to follow through and in the time since I've done what I said I would.
All day today, I've felt a subtle energy, something light and clear. I've realized what it is: the energy of hope. Not the hope that I will put something out into the world which will be recognized and rewarded, but the hope that I can change the old patterns which have so often in the past kept me from doing so. I can't control what happens after I've done my part. All I can do, and it's crucial, is to act in spite of binding old habits. I can accept the challenge of change.
There are "frameworks" and "contexts" which are the opposite of what interests me. Many contexts grow out of rigid ideas - the orthodoxies of organized religion, political ideologies, conspiracy theories. These are closed systems and their main characteristic - and failing - is that they don't allow for new information and ideas. Everything that might be "new" is made to fit a locked world view, interpreted as further evidence of the rightness of the particular set of beliefs. These systems constrict rather than expand, limit rather than increase.
All beliefs - those that constrict and those that expand - are just that, beliefs. For a long time, I believed every negative thought the voices in my head shouted at me, believed that I wasn't good enough and was doomed to frustration and unhappiness. I thought there must be something fundamentally wrong with me, some flaw I couldn't see. And because it's hard to act against that tidal wave of fear and doubt, the facts of my life lived out those thoughts. I was frustrated and unhappy, felt alien and isolated; I censored myself over and over again because, since I was doomed to failure, what was the point of even trying to achieve and connect? These self-loathing, self-lacerating beliefs ruled me and turned me into an emotional anorexic; I was starving for connection and purpose but I couldn't feed myself. I was living in a closed system of negative beliefs and everything that happened was proof of the rightness of those beliefs. How could it be otherwise when I myself was the main witness for the prosecution?
Then something inside me began to shift, and the closed narrow ideology of my self-loathing and fear slowly, very slowly showed enough cracks so that the light of hope, at first a despairing kind of hope, could come in. A flicker of possibility, the merest shadow and I grabbed on to it. I didn't know it then, but I had come a great distance in order to begin, to climb out of the bushes and step on to the path.
Questions worth asking:
If belief, meaning and value are conferred by us through our interpreting consciousness, how do we know what's True with a capital T? Does Truth even exist?
How can we create a new context through which to judge our experience, transform a context that constricts into one that expands?
How do we move toward freedom?
