Soul Priority.

So I'm casting in a trout stream a few evenings ago. It's a downright holy beautiful dusk, about 75 degrees, the light softening into dull orange as the last of the sun filters through the contours of a riverside cornfield littered with straw-colored stalks from last year's crop. The water is ice-clear and swishing-fast and I can feel its cold through my waders. A friend told me the fishing would be incredible for these few days after the big rain that swept the muck out of the stream, and she was right: the trout are leaping out of the water for mayflies, and I already have a hefty brown on my stringer that I'll gratefully take home for dinner after having returned maybe a dozen smaller trout to the water.

I am wading back upstream toward the riverbank trail to head home, and I have basically let go of fishing for the day but I figure, hell, why not cast my way back. So as I slosh upstream I make maybe my second or third casual cast, and a few feet from my left leg -- whammo! -- fish on. Nice one. Whoa. Really nice one. I give it line, play the fish out, try to avoid doing anything stupid, and I clumsily if effectively land it, and, man, it's an even bigger brown than the other, just gorgeous, fat and the length of half my arm and wet-sheened with its brown and yellow skin and red and black speckles. And now, suddenly, I have dinner for two days instead of one. I thank the river and this trout -- which is the least one can do before eating a creature -- and I resume wading upstream, shaking my head. I'd been barely fishing at that point. I'd thought I was done. Who knew?

All of which is a way of saying that time spent without intent is a good thing.

Don't get me wrong; intention matters. A lot. You'd starve without it. Ask anyone who has been hungry. Grasping intentionality, actually, has been one of the great lessons of my life. But there are also many things that planned intention will never, ever bring. A big trout in a spot where you'd never reasonably expect a trout to be is one of them.

Fact is, a nonstop diet of schemed-out intent is a bad thing. It is one of our afflictions as Americans. So many of us rush around in this moment-to-moment stream of appetites, each one 10 minutes long but cumulatively consuming a lifetime: I want this. I need that. I'll accomplish this. I'll have that. And when we look up we're fat, unhappy, sick, and then dead. Because it is never enough. Faster is not more; louder is not stronger; fuller is not happier. It's a starvation diet of gluttony. Because the less the soul gets, the more it craves, and the more it claws for satisfaction in moment-to-moment appetites, the less it receives.

I am convinced, for instance, that this soul starvation is what is behind the current product category of "Extreme" experiences: Extreme sports, Extreme amusement park rides, Extreme vacations, Extreme contests, Extreme caffeine drinks. It's a kind of buried desperation, a panting place within us that lusts for what every next moment might deliver: Wanna feel. Wanna feel.

Action -- in the sense of ceaseless American pursuit -- will never get us there.

But certain kinds of anti-action, or at least interludes of anti-action, will. This antidote to consumptive addiction goes by a million names, and each works pretty well in its way. Meditation, a temporary suspension of intent, is one. Prayer or reverence, a surrender to one's sense of a greater reality, is another. Plain old silence and stillness without plan or destination is another. Call it whatever you want. Do it in whatever way you want. But without some measure of it in your life, you are on a gerbil wheel. Which is why I think so many Americans -- including the followers of a certain goal-directed narcissism that passes itself off as fundamentalist religion -- are spinning out in the hyper-pursuit of true feeling.

A drummer I know, driving home the point at which blindingly-fast technique becomes intuition, said to me one day, "Some things are impossible to play at the speed of thought. But they can be played at the speed of feeling." A Buddhist friend of mine cited a quote: "The great matter of life and death is at hand. Do not waste time." It's all the same thing: your soul, or, if you like, the awareness at the heart of you, wants to be entirely here in the world. When it is not, it gets frantic and unhappy.

This is what, on his best days when he is not caving to expediency, President Barack Obama can now bring to American political identity: soul. I don't mean soul in the sense of cool moves and brother-with-a-red-phone power, although that's all good. I mean soul in the sense of moral integrity. Not the phony kind that praises Jesus while torturing at secret prisons, but the genuine variety that sets and follows humane and just standards for what it means to be an American. Sean Paul Kelley of The Agonist put it this way in writing about the current controversy over torture:

And still, we're asking the wrong questions about torture--meanwhile the newspapers still label it as 'harsh interrogation techniques,' like this semantic bullshit means we didn't do something horrible, unspeakable and immoral. Alas, the question still being asked comes in the form of today's New York Times headline story: 'At Core of Detainee Fight: Did Methods Stop Attacks?'

That's not the right question or even assumption to debating torture. Torture is immoral and unspeakable under any circumstances. Its efficacy shouldn't even be considered. Why am I such an absolutist about this? Because once we torture we lose our soul. There is nothing left to fight for after that, no brutality that will not be considered or implemented. We are either civilized, enlightened human beings or we are not.

We are a nation in search of some kind of equilibrium with the larger world. This will not come with proud ambition or strutted prowess or studied expertise. It will come only with an honest reckoning of what is right and how to act in accordance with how we ourselves would want to be treated. It's the kind of thing that comes only when you are not trying to prevail: when you have caught your trout and you are headed upstream toward home, having let go of any demand for more.

It's enough to make you want to sit and be quiet for a little while.

Comments

[Amanuel Malik]

A three fold AMEN is all I could say to this awesome piece! At the end of the day, it all boils down to the golden rule: true freedom (by that I mean a morally integrated life)comes through dying to self (not in a masochist sense but as in humbling oneself)so as to lift others. Thanks Bruce! It was so refreshing to read this entry.

Amanuel

[zot23]

Great post, I particularly like how everything wraps back to the golden rule: do unto others as you would wish them to do unto you. Really, all religion revolves around that principle and is the point of all the major bibles, korans, etc. Everything else in those books is just a string of corollaries.

Now I want to go fishing...

[KingElvis]

I'm a follower of Sean Paul and I'm glad you read him as well.

Great rejection of the "MORE" aesthetic. Like if 16" wheels are good, 20" wheels are better and 22" are EVEN BETTER. Same with the 'bomb' bass stereos.

Not to be alarmist, but one thing that the press has carefully avoided: If we are going to torture "enemy combatants" that maybe weren't really captured on a 'battlefield' but instead turned in by dirt poor Afghans in need of the $100 bounty, why wouldn't some administration expand the "enemy combatant" category into..."The enemy WITHIN."

I mean if anyone who was a 'foreigner' in Afghanistan in 2001 is on the list, why not 'traitors' - like Democrats who refuse to endorse torture?

In the same way the CIA seemed to bring its ruthlessness back into the US (in the form of 'former' CIA operative Lee Harvey Oswald) why couldn't the CIA bring it's torture home as well?

If they can do it to 'enemy combatants' then why not "the enemy within?"

[Ribald]

A beautiful post. I really needed that. Thanks.

[michaelj]

amen!
good writing good thoughts
glad i took the time to read

thanks

[Zee]

Followed a link from another blog to find this beautiful essay. Bravo, and thanks!