self-exploration | Neal Lemery

—by Neal Lemery

Spring garden chores bring me into a contemplative mood. I take a fresh look at the garden and the yard, mentally planning out how I want to plant this year. I also get philosophical while I’m mowing the grass, feeling the energy of spring bursting out all over. I am often stunned into silence at the wonder of it all.

I’m reminded of the renewing cycle of life that brings about change. In the garden, I am an instrument of change, and also a witness of ancient ways. Old patterns can be repeated, or altered and made better. Often, the best action is to weed them out.

I am an organizer, a weeder, a planter. Yet the real instruments of change are nature’s: the strengthening sunlight, the occasional rain, seeds sprouting, leaves emerging, flowers bursting into color and brilliance. I do my best work when I take a long time just being the observer.

The Irish poet and priest John O’Donohue writes:

“There is a beautiful complexity of growth within the human soul. In order to glimpse this, it is helpful to visualize the mind as a tower of windows. Sadly, many people remain trapped at the one window, looking out every day at the same scene in the same way. Real growth is experienced when you draw back from that one window, turn, and walk around the inner tower of the soul and see all the different windows that await your gaze. Through these different windows, you can see new vistas of possibility, presence, and creativity. Complacency, habit, and blindness often prevent you from feeling your life. So much depends on the frame of vision — the window through which you look.”

I do better in life when I take advantage of that “other view” and look out into the world with a new vantage point. It is humbling and also refreshing. Old patterns, old thinking can be re-examined. Often, new ideas emerge, and I gain a different perspective. I might even dare to set aside my cherished and deeply-held convictions and opinions, and look at the world in a new way, much like how a contemplative gardener looks at their projects on a bright and sunny spring day. Exploring the alternatives gives us so many more options.

Spring is a time of renewal, of growth, a time to think of the possibilities of the coming summer. I do my best work when I take on the role of the observer, the contemplator, to be a tinkerer of the whole picture, looking on from all of the windows in my soul.

4/29/2021

“Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well, he would never know, now.”

–Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936)

Afraid to try; not good enough. There’s that fear of digging in deep, opening old wounds, leery of discovering what’s I’ve buried deep. It is my lifetime work of denial, in all its many facets.

What if there were really monsters under my bed as a kid, and I put them away, trying to ignore them, or burying them deep in my soul, so I wouldn’t have to confront them? I’m good at denying the existence of that question.

“Go away and leave me alone,” I say to myself.

In my writing work, there are topics and germs of ideas “out there” that should be explored, that remain on the “idea list”. They are controversial, provocative, and daunting. Some are political, most are sociological hot potatoes. Some of those are today’s monsters under the bed, the thoughts and fears I am now denying, at least not confronting.

I’m good at running away from confrontation, from the difficult stuff of life, the emotional chaos that literally begs for self-examination, self-reflection. It’s flight or fight, and denial. Yet, when I dig into the tough stuff, scraping off the scabby outer coverings, and allowing the pus to seep out, so I can cleanse the psychological infections, a newly revealed truth emerges. I begin to heal, and, more importantly, to understand.

All writing is a form of self-exploration, a teaching moment for the soul. I work at trying not to realize that, which is part of my denial and my lifetime of procrastination in dealing with the tough subjects.

Hemingway’s character wasn’t ready to face his monsters and put pencil to paper to dig into those personal challenges. He knew that, and knew he wasn’t ready to take it on, yet also knowing that he should take it on, because that is where the challenges are, and, ultimately, the reward of going deep and wrestling with the really tough stuff in life.

Writing challenges me, pushes me to go deeper inside of myself, to confront my night monsters, my fears, my doubts, and my unfinished thoughts. There is work to be done when I write, so much more than moving the pencil across the paper, an act of growing myself, of discovery.

4/16/2021 Neal Lemery