Icarus got a bad rap. In case the story is a bit lost in the archives of your memory, here is a refresher: Daedalus and Icarus are father and son and have become imprisoned in the Labyrinth. Daedalus figures out how to fashion wings from feathers and wax to help them escape. As they take to the air, Daedalus warns his son Icarus not to fly too close to the sun so that the wax does not melt. Icarus becomes overjoyed with flight, and keeps getting higher until, all of the sudden, the wax melts and he falls to his death in ocean.

On the one hand, and how this story is most often interpreted by our elementary or middle school teachers, this is an instructive about not reaching beyond our limits, about not being too ambitious. On the other hand, here we have two oppressed beings trying to figure out how to get free, to liberate themselves from tyranny. What a painful duality: to live in chains or to die attempting to break free?

There is something innately unfair in this confused world where, on the one hand, you have a billionaire-elite class taking steps to put people on Mars while at the same time people are starving. That is not hyperbole, that is fact---a pervasive and devastating duality and reality. Yet these teaching stories do not adequately treat the paradox and nuance.

What is lost in this story of Icarus is the path between these dualities and a culture which helps us navigate the tyranny and oppression extant around us by helping instill in each of us a sense of trying to lift ourselves and one another up.

How do we engage in our search for liberty while not bypassing our innate and beautiful limitations as human animals?

I have spent most of the last few weeks at our off-grid, wood-heated, solar-energized cabin. I love this place, and love getting to share it with our friends and human community throughout the year and also at the New Years Visioning Passage program which we offer for free annually to our community. -LINK-

Writing this morning, I feel so grateful and privileged to be here offgrid, in this simplicity. I can see through the glass face of our stove that the fire is low and needs fuel. Next to that stove the cabin might be ninety degrees; in the front bedroom or the bathroom, the cabin might be thirty–-currently. Soon the circulations of cold air exchanges will invite me to stoke the fire. Putting on snow boots, snow coats, and grabbing one of the electric chainsaws heating by the fire, I will need to head outside to the pile of eight-foot logs which I stacked for cutting about ten-feet from the entrance deck. Three-days ago I felled about a dozen standing dead, about one-hundred feet to the north of the cabin, through belly-deep snow. Snowshoes were a must in that process, as are the multiple utility sleds which help me move the more manageable pieces for further processing as needed.

We have only so much water, caught rain and melted snow from last summer to fall that is stored in cisterns. We have only so much food with the nearest grocery two hours away by multiple travel methods and/or machines. We have only so much electricity for lighting our home, running the fridge, and charging the chainsaws–-the latter necessary for the wood.

Yet, all of these limitations actually invite a deepening into the experience of being, are additive to the wholeness and peace I feel here. Leaning in and beginning to explore our human limitations is also an inherent part of a wilderness rite of passage ceremony, a necessary step in cultivating the dark and fertile soil of our soul. As Chodron (2012) explained, "in truth, the very nature of our existence is forever in flux. Everything keeps changing, whether we're aware of it or not" (p. 3). Exploring our limitations, our struggles, our desire for sameness, our grief, our fears, and so forth, becomes deep preparation for the greatest transformation of all.

Maybe no one told you this lately, but we are all going to die.

"How do we relate to the most fundamental of all fears, the fear of death?" (Chodron, 2022, p. 1). This is the opening question Tibetan Buddhist nun, scholar, teacher, and practitioner invites us in to. Chogyam Trungpa explained that great transformation in this way: "You breathe out and keep going" (Chodron, 2022, p. 24).

In many ways, our limitations are actually that which makes life worth living because of the very real pressure of limited time: I cannot be typing this blog while also working on rebuilding our railing; I cannot be sitting in ceremony catching stories while also teaching a course on ecopsychology; I cannot be running while chopping wood; I cannot celebrate the joy of flight (Icarus) while I am studying my chains (limitations).

Of course, this is an easy thing to understand. So many of us, myself notwithstanding, spend our days wrapped up in self-imposed productivity timelines and deadlines in an attempt to get there. But there is here, is now, is this breath, in this moment, in this single exchange of letters to each other.

The limitations we feel point to something profound about our relationship and misunderstanding of time: "we don't get or have time… we are time" (Burkeman, 2021, p. 215).

  we are time

There is a funny kind of irony apparent when living this simplified environment like our off-grid cabin, where so much of what needs doing is physically strenuous, a rekindling of how nearly all human ancestors lived before modernity, before thermostats and automobiles. An awareness emerges authentically that movement is something we are not something we do (Sheets-Johnstone, 2019; Gintis, 2007).

Even more, there can be an expansion of awareness as I begin to look around, take notice of the preciousness of this single moment, and see the lifeworld again with fresh eyes.  As Abram (1995) explained, "We are human only in contact and conviviality with what is not human. Only in reciprocity with what is Other do we begin to heal ourselves" ( p. 315). In seeing this reciprocity, this potent interconnectedness, this powerful angle of insight into our and others living frailty, an awareness can take root about what life is really all about. The space between you and me, between human and more-than-human, between life and death, begins to reshape the fluid of our intelligence and aliveness.

This awareness that is beginning to take shape is about the critical importance of discernment as we live our integrated, adult lives. The preciousness of existence cannot simply be back-burner-ed because each day the sun will rise and set as the fabric of our being is always becoming and always dying. Thus, what is important, what is critical, what is meaningful, calls out and calls us in.

For Chodron (2022), this is the most essential teaching from her life studying the Tibetan Bardos, as she succinctly put it, "how we live is how we die" (p. 19). Can we be with this moment, and the next, without running to check off some goal? Sometimes, maybe, but the pressures of life in this busy culture are difficult, are limiting, are vast.

Yet, that is the key: how can we let those limitations, those pressures, those difficulties awaken us into our seat of life practice so that instead of waiting until everything is perfectly figured out, we let each moment and struggle bring us back into the present, our purpose, our aliveness. In this great acceptance of our limitations, a potent transformation and liberation can occur. But it takes tenacity, patience, and loving kindness to self and other.

It takes practice.

References

Abram, D. (1995). The ecology of magic. In T. Roszak,  M. Gomes, & A. Kanner (Eds.), ​Ecopsychology: Restoring the earth, healing the mind ​(pp. 301–315). Sierra Club Books.

Burkeman, O. (2021). Four thousand weeks: Time management for mortals. Picador.

Chodron, P. (2012). Living beautifully with uncertainty and change. Shambhala.

Chodron, P. (2022). How we live is how we die. Shambhala.

Gintis, B. (2007). Engaging the movement of life: Exploring health and embodiment through osteopathy and continuum. North Atlantic Books.

Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2019). Essential dimensions of being a body. In H. Payne, S. Koch, J. Tantia, & T. Fuchs (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of embodied perspectives in psychotherapy: Approaches from dance movement and body psychotherapies (pp. 19–27). Routledge.