IS: The unbreakable vow
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Last week I wrote about being the change
I was listening to Bill Plotkin with Nate Hagens recently, which introduced me to a poem "All the True Vows" by David Whyte, which I will excerpt:
...
Hold to the truth
at the center of the image
you were born with,
don’t turn your face away.…Remember,
in this place
no one can hear youand out of the silence
you can make a new promise
it will kill you to break,that way you’ll find out
what is real and what is not.
...
What kind of promise would it kill you to break? Not the kind of promises we speak every day. Perhaps there is a promise buried in the very fabric of our being.
My friend Tasshin wrote What is a vow? and this bit stuck out at me:
Everyone has a vow. To my understanding, what a vow is is your life—all of the actions you take, and the effects of those actions.
and also
It emerges from that dance between self and world—your values, dreams, and skills, and the circumstances you find yourself in, the requests the world asks of you.
I've heard, seen, and experienced a pattern in adult development that could well be called the uncovering of one's vow. Not quite our "life's mission is to..." that an individuating young adult might declare, nor the accomplishment that will bring us love or worth, but rather it's an uncovering of our own very nature in contact with the nature of the transcendent universe. In the pattern, it happens after the burnout of adult achiever phase, near the end of the unraveling and letting-go of self-authored selfhood, in the quiet stillness after deconstruction into self-transforming (or no-self) perspective. It is baked into "the image you were born with", and in childhood, and by the whole of our life experiences.
I hold in me, or am even made up of, a promise to myself and to the universe. I cannot speak to you my true unbreakable vow, as the version that can be named is not the true fullness of it. Nor is it fixed in time: it is a process that is both eternal and ever-evolving. But you'll know you've found yours when, after stripping away your own conscious goals and concerns and plans, you find yourself connected to a quality of devotion that you recognize as beyond yourself and in your self — is your self — such that to "break" it would be inconceivable, a death beyond the physical.
I'm toying with the proposition that there is, in fact, only one vow that exists in the universe. Those with whom I have communed and gestured together at service, love, and life have not disabused me of this fanciful theory. Whether this is "true" or not seems unknowable. If the universal vow of I am that I am is etched into our beings, we each may attune to that vow of Life and the meaning-purpose-intention embedded in the very fabric of being.
My life is (with less and less reservation as I grow) a flow of devotion and service to the unbreakable vow. The devotion of others then resonates with mine and strengthens us both. The reverence in the connection in the culture-field in Intentional Society gatherings — it flows from the vows of those who are able to make it. It calls to those who have not yet uncovered it. It is what is there. It is.
Yours truly,
James