If self-development and spiritual development are part of the same spectrum of consciousness and not simply antagonists then early damage to the former can cripple the emergence of the latter.

Ken Wilbur, The Eye of Spirit

Not long out of college, I happily returned from a year in the capitalist mecca of San Diego to Vermont where I had received my undergraduate degree, to immerse myself in Thoreau and Emerson, Blake and Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Whitman and Theodore Roethke, and e.e. cummings. These were all writers that spoke to me. I recited lines of poetry like mantras and felt that these authors had something to say to my heart about beauty and meaning and truth.

I took a job at the Brattleboro Retreat, an ancient psychiatric hospital, and bought a “renovated” cabin deep in the Vermont woods as my refuge. To spoil the end of this story, I soon discovered the woodsman life was unlike my romantic and idealized visions. Nature did not welcome me. In fact, I soon found resistant barriers to my transcendental urgings.

My learning began when, much like an archaeologist painstakingly digging back into the past, I removed layers of wood trim from the walls and ceiling of the cabin, discovering that the beams that would have supported this idyllic structure did not exist. They were an illusion, a figment of stability. By the time I finished my exploration with crowbar and hammer, I was surrounded by piles of pine boards. It was then that I fully grasped, with some astonishment, how little support was holding up the second floor and loft.

I had a similar experience as I began stocking my little farm. Layers of self-deception and magical thinking were pried loose, revealing a starker reality. Indeed, this could be the overarching metaphor of my young adult life, as I learned, for instance, that ducklings mature and, at some point, will be capable of flying out of the pen I built for them. All at once, in unison, together as one, just as I finished feeding them one morning, the flock rose out of the wire boundaries, rising skyward.

How had I not thought to put a top on it?

My two goats (mother and son) soon taught me that they had an intuitive knowledge of how to dismantle any fence I erected with wood, nails, and metal screws. Many days I found them standing on the deck, staring in the window at me, quite self-satisfied. Even the rabbits escaped their enclosures and found cozier accommodations under the small barn.

Fiona, my one sheep, was my nervous beautiful girl. She was a spherical creature, white mostly, but with a crochet pattern on the top of her head: white and brown and pinkish, with large gold eyes.

I found her one afternoon dead and stiff with rigor mortis, and I spent the next few hours with an axe on the icy dirt, trying to dig a grave deep enough for her. I was shivering and sweaty in my ragged leather coat. Distraught. I remember with clarity reciting an e.e. cummings poem over her. I was some mad Shakespearean character, filled with unbearable shame.

what if a much of a which of a wind
gives the truth to summer’s lie;
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry?

Later an old Vermont farmer told me that a ton of native vegetation was toxic to sheep and my land was surely filled with many plants that could have killed her.

Dangerous and unconscious

All of this deconstruction of my back-to-nature fantasies happened in near sub-zero temperatures and sometimes heavy snow and ice storms. In a startlingly beautiful landscape, I discovered how little I knew about the difficulties of existing in the real world outside of contemporary conveniences. My ignorance and preconceptions were removed like the rotting soggy insulation under the floorboards, until there it was—and the truth was bleak. I was ill-equipped to live like this. To even exist for long without electricity and running water on only a foundation built of found rock. I had to return to civilization, or at least what passes as that in our world. Maybe my experience of freedom lasted longer than Thoreau’s experiment at Walden Pond, but not by much.

Many years later, I acknowledged my youthful efforts to return to a state of nature as a kind of “spiritual bypass.” This phrase was coined by John Welwood in the 1980s to describe a way of using spiritual notions and preoccupations to avoid more difficult—more painful—psychological challenges.

I left Vermont with a psyche stripped, de-romanticized, more aware that I could not take care of a small handful of animals in my care. The creatures didn’t care about my state of mind and heart. They were foreign beings with their own notions, temperaments, and survival needs. And my endless stream of spiritual grandiosity made me dangerous to them.

 

[i] Ken Wilbur, The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad,, (Shambhala Publications Boston 1997), Notes 367.

[ii]E. E. Cummings, Complete Poems: 1904-1962, Edited by James Firmage, 1944

[iii] John Welwood, Toward a Psychology of Awakening, (Shambhala, 2002).