Cruising the odyssey with wholeness, I discovered three lifeforces filling the sails of the ship ferrying us across the unknown seas :
After the many transfigurations embedded in an odyssey, I have landed somewhere on the other side. I now find myself on an island, Bornholm, transformed and regenerated, all the more so when I lean on, and into, the tree of life that is contemplative awareness. For now, I want to take some time, through my personal experience of piercing the veil of self-reflective awareness, to look back at the third driving force: the longing to unify what appears to be chaotic, fragmented and scattered beyond any meaningful purpose. In other words, I am curious about the power of creativity germinating and flowering in us as we move through the combustion chamber and offer ourselves to the refiner’s fire. I am eager to contemplate all the movements and stations on the odyssey that generate a creation spirituality.
I have always been someone who manages to create something out of nothing. I spent my whole professional life setting up innovative educational institutes from scratch. Interestingly, once the project had gathered momentum, expertise and recognition, I would step aside, knowing that it was time to let others take over, and watch the original project blossom into something else. I was in many respects a trailblazer, someone able to kickstart an educational innovation, but not the person who would work on the long-term and the sustainability of the seed-project.
I suspect that my penchant for creating something out of nothing was ignited during my childhood. I remember seeing beauty in the poverty-stricken neighbourhood of my grandparents house and creating art work from broken and discarded objects. Then, of course, there was the dramatic experience of being abruptly uprooted from the familiar world of England and thrown into the bizarre world of Switzerland which I have told in An Archaeology of the Personality.
During the first half of my life, I enjoyed moving through different projects, growing in capacity and expertise with each experience. I rapidly became an expert in successfully implementing pioneering work in challenging circumstances where there was outspoken hostility towards change. The experiences were stimulating, thought-provoking and broadened my horizons, but also slightly, if not highly, addictive as I found myself chasing one exciting project after another keen to shine, reap successes and gain further recognition.
I was gently rafting down the river of my successful life when, at the age of 50, I went through a major personal shift: I left my marriage and the place I had been living in for more than forty years. Nothing surprising in this. Truth be said, I was beginning to feel bored and I was fidgeting in my comfort zone. With hindsight, I smile as I look back on that threshold moment when I entered the second half of my life and began to make my way back home. Of course, at the time, I had no idea that this was the plan. I thought that, finally untethered from a marriage strangled by co-dependency, I would be sailing off towards even more thrilling endeavours.
Within short, I did find myself involved in large-scale projects building on my expertise around system thinking and paradigmatic shifts. This time I voluntarily pulled myself out of my comfort zone and consented to uproot myself, because I felt, to stay in the garden metaphors, that I needed to be re-potted in a larger field. Ironically, this is when my yearning to settle down and spread out my roots started to escalate. The innovations and pioneering projects I was leading got more ambitious but were also dramatically short-lived. I would suggest a credible roadmap to get the project up and running, recruit the leadership team and, as soon as the team had found their sea feet, were committed to distributed leadership and able to steward the project, I would be pushed out because a latent crisis came to the forefront.
The large-scale projects were electrifying because I was efficaciously steering the innovations through organisational inertia and reducing the time it took to reach cruising speed. But they were also frustrating because of the circumstances that led to my departure and the fact that I had to walk away from a job, a place and the people I had enjoyed creating with. The fallout also reduced to smithereens any sense of homecoming or belonging to a place or community. Something in me became restless fuelled by the growing sense of unfulfillment and the struggle to hold on to my vision and dreams each time I entered the lands of exile. It is hardly surprising then that the external troubles and the mental struggles slowly eroded my sense of purpose in life. In other words, I found myself in a full-blown mid-life crisis: I was falling apart or, in kinder words, the high-functioning egoic operating system was coming undone, at last.
I brought with me to Bornholm my restlessness and vexed spirit. I desperately wanted to slow down, put out roots and stop leading breath-taking projects. I wanted to untangle myself from identity politics and let something else take over. I wanted to enjoy the ordinary and become a lady of leisure. The idea of chasing after the next exciting project didn’t make sense any longer, although, truth be said, converting an old farmhouse into a retreat centre still held a lot of the driving forces of my previous life.
I have now reached the age of retirement and am receiving a small but perfectly adequate pension having invested most of my money in the property and the renovation. I am undeniably well into the second half of life and the end of my life is hovering on the horizon. New questions pop up such as, ‘For whom am I doing this? Who is going to take over the renovated property and tend to its growth? What growth can be imagined in a world that has suddenly become more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous? With whom am I going to share what I have gathered?’
I have stopped questioning whether I am in the right place, doing the right thing. I have stopped worrying about dying in the wrong place. My vow to die on British soil, for instance, was a decision taken by the bewildered seven-year old girl who needed a strong statement to navigate the perilous waters she was swimming in. The vow served her ego development and powered the survival programme to generate strength and resilience, uphold hope and faith. But once we have sailed through the perilous seas of the first half of life, it becomes imperative to disarm the survival kit and set the inner compass on thriving and joy, plenty of joy, after the years of fear and anxiety speckled with sorrows of all sorts.
L’être humain a peur de la vie et il est surtout en quête de la sécurité de l’existence. Il cherche, tout compte fait, davantage à survivre qu’à vivre. Or survivre, c’est exister sans vivre … et c’est déjà mourir.
Frédéric Lenoir, 2006, French philosopher.
Human beings are afraid of life and, above all, are in search of the security of existence. They seek more than anything to survive rather than to live. But to survive is to exist without living… and that is already to die.
The transition is beautifully captured in the French language stressing the shift from survivre (to survive) to vivre, from the Latin vivere which literally means to begin to live. All it takes is to drop the prefix sur-, a superfluous appendix, and to delve into the fullness of a life unchained from the slavery of the mind. It might sound oversimplistic but it does retain that we are forever growing, a core principle encapsulated in the first driving force propelling the evolutionary thrust: the drive to grow and evolve.
Working on the Fruits of Yggdrasil has encouraged me to look back on my trajectory of the past eight years, with kindness and reverence, and to flick through all the pictures I took of the renovation work documenting the transition from almost nothing, the rubble of the previous farm, to something waiting to blossom in a future graced with love. I see pockets of beauty scattered everywhere, all the areas where seeds of compassion have been sown and are waiting to sprout. I have created something here on Bornholm, something which I believe has a huge potential for growth and expansion. I fully understand now that the loss of purpose I experienced at the beginning of my odyssey changed the nature of the conversation. Somewhere along the path, without realising it, I discarded the survival kit and began to live without any ‘why questions’ which is the hallmark of the second half of life.
So, having died to the first half of my life, where does this leave me? What next? I am adamant that I don’t want to leave the project before my time is up. I want to be part of the continuity. I want to weave sustainability into the folds and pleats of what is unfolding. I want to share with others everything I have patiently gathered here on Bornholm and see how we could collectively continue to tend to the radiant beauty and goodness of creation in this little corner of the planet.
My yearning is no longer about settling down, spreading roots and earthing myself. It is not about coming out of exile and unapologetically affirming who and what I am. My deepest desire is simple: I want to share with others everything I have created. I want to gather around me people yearning for a contemplative life, people eager to pour their resources and talents into gift economy, people keen to create a place of inner peace and outer joy and, more than anything, people longing to be a living presence in the world.
So, establishing an intentional community house feels a propitious conduit for bring all this to fruition. It can be built up from the foundations of what has already been transformed as we continue to create something, and everything, out of nothing because we willingly consent to be self-emptied.
Garden metaphors have been used across traditions to speak of transformation: mystical poetry, for instance, parsing the intermingling of the rose and the thorn in the courtly love of troubadour poetry; plainsong chanting the divine greening (Hildegard von Bingen) and polyphonic music opening our hearts to communion with the divine (Tallis, Palestrina, Bach, Arvo Pärt, to name a few); sacred texts portraying the point of origin (the garden of Eden, the Hesperides or Eternity) or the vanishing point on the horizon of afterlife (paradise, nirvana, hades); and, finally, the gospels describing the evolution of human consciousness to become whole through individuation, one with all creation, a branch of the vineyard, flourishing in participatory life.
I have become a passionate gardener myself since working in the huge gardens surrounding the house. I find solace and inspiration in the maintenance tasks, the ones that require putting my hands in the earth, the dirtier the better. I enjoy weeding and battling with the local varieties of bindweed, pruning the overgrown hedges and cutting back the brambles, designing compost areas and creating borders from branches and stones.
In other creative enterprises, I have dived into the rich lexicon of garden metaphors to chronicle my odyssey, landscaping my inner world around the tree of life. In the sanctuary of my workspace, I articulate words and music to light up images of wholeness and paint in configurations of oneness. Recently, I came across a perfect match illustrating the confluence of garden metaphors with the singing heart: Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy (Psalm 126:5 NKJV). Tears and joy together? Another koan pointing to the paradoxes and contradictions that make up the tragedy of life. For each treasure gleaned, for each lesson learnt on our outer and inner voyages, there will also be losses and grief, a lot of grief. This is what I experienced, for instance, each time I had to leave behind the innovative project I had initiated.
The psalmist reminds us that when sowing is done in sorrow, then we engage in participatory life and stand in solidarity with all the pain and the fathomless grief burrowed in the human condition. It is good to be reminded that if we are faithful and steadfast in our grief, humble and simple in our acceptance of the pain, we will resurface on the other side of the transformative experience. We can trust that we will eventually be thrown up on a new shore of invitation where unutterable joy lies beneath the depths of grief.
An odyssey with wholeness takes us on circuitous pathways to the centre of the pattern where we uncover the truth of who we are and what we are called to give to the world. Along the road we let go of everything we have outgrown so as to ready ourselves for the new. Like all true initiations, the odyssey teaches us about dying to the little, constricted self so as to be born to the powerful, authentic self. The spiralling route takes us through different stages of consciousness as we transition from object/subject dualities to unitive consciousness and greater love. The circumvolutions evoke waves ferrying us across the cycles of life revealed in the universal pattern of birth, death and rebirth.
Contemplative life implies being in rhythm with the seasons of change and abiding the natural cycles of transformation. Contemplation invites us to deeply engage with silence and stillness trusting that all the tears shed in our exile transform our anger into compassion, an exile from which we return eager to share our well-earned wisdom and to be of service to community. The solitude naturally arising through contemplative practices is conducive to the mystery of individuation: we become more alive when we engage in creative and intimate union with others.
Contemplation without action begets vacuous detachment.
Action without contemplation breeds compulsive attachment.
For the time being the community house is still a seed-project, patiently bidding its time before springing from the foundations of what has already grown on the sacred island of Bornholm. Let’s draw on the power of imagination to awaken the slumbering heart and begin to create something from nothing.
What would reaping in joy look like?
When I sit down in my meditation chair to clarify my intentions around the community house and identify the next practical steps, I have vivid images of the medieval beguignages of the Netherlands I once visited, where lay religious women came together and designed a contemplative life outside the spheres of influence of mainstream religion. Educated and financially independent of men (husbands, fathers or brothers), they shared their resources and, contrary to the cloistered nunneries, they actively took part in the social life around them. Their conscious intent was to practice Christian wisdom, not to preach it. This is what appeals to me, notwithstanding the call to found a community of mature and wise women free of the attaches of co-dependency. Wise women have done their inner shadow work by actively engaging in intimate relationships, be it marriage or motherhood. Through their devotional practices, they learn to spin the golden thread that leads out of the labyrinth of the mind and into the empty space of luminous presence and grace.
The vision is so compelling that I feel the quivers of impatience and the urgency that is propelling it forwards. Like an excited child I want the community house to begin as soon as, even this autumn when the tourist season comes to an end. I look forward to being relieved of the workload involved in running the guest lodge and to be able to rely on the strengths and skills of others to hone the art of hospitality. Yet, I love the collusion of my impatience and my desire: it helps the seed-project gain momentum and not stop midstream drifting away as another good idea that hasn’t landed on a robust foundational ground and grown roots. The inner guidance that comes to me when I work in the garden tells me that there is to be a seventh season of the guest lodge in 2026 before the final push that births the community house.
Meanwhile I trust my contemplative discipline and the practice of resting under the tree of life with surrendered trust and gratitude, that is, to do nothing, knowing that from this nothing something will come and reveal the way forward.
As I wait, I catch the fragrances of the seasons of creation spiritualty. I pause, breathe and listen. Calm body, smiling heart. Empty mind, singing heart. Then, the singing heart finds a few words to recognise, and praise, the transformative experience.
