Thomas Moore on Friendship

“Each friend is indeed a world, a special sphere of certain emotions, experiences, memoires, and qualities of personality. Each friend takes us into a world that is ourselves as well. We are all made up of many worlds and each friendship brings one or more of those worlds to life. Friendship “constellates” (the word means “an arranging of stars”) one’s unique universe of meaning and value. One shares with a friend a unique way of looking at life and experiencing it, and so our friendships perform a kind of astrology of the soul, opening planetary worlds for us, to give our lives culture and articulation. To lose a friend is to suffer the loss of worlds, and to be lacking in friendship altogether is to be cut off, in a deeply felt way, from a richly self-defining way of being in the world…

Friendship creates the cosmologies in which we live…”

Thomas Moore, Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationships

Three Wise Men

When a beloved friend wrote from overseas to say he was “drowning in melancholy,” I wondered sadly what had already happened to the wave of super-optimism that flashed briefly earlier this year. I had surged with a sense of possibility, creatively, and knew a rush of hope for the environmental and social disaster our world has become. It seemed that the wave was universal, and headlines everywhere proclaimed the urgency of the planet’s welfare.

And then…what goes up, must come down. Can we really effect change at all? Does the ripple effect even have time to…well, ripple- before we run out of water? Can we actually feed the kids who are starving, solve the greenhouse effect, control cancer, replenish the soil’s minerals, and live without racial, gender or other prejudices? Truth is, I doubt it.

My Germanic intellectual pragmatism says even if we magically get it all right tonight, all of us, everywhere, and start dedicated action first thing in the morning, we can’t stop fate. There’s not enough water and too many chemicals and drugs. We can’t agree with our next-door neighbours on which God is right, if any, and what to do with the local homeless. So we’ll never agree with the hundreds of other countries and their pressing agendas. War has prevailed from the beginning of history, and so have gluttony, greed, rape, and murder.

So pervading my emotional self, the one that exhilarates in finding meaning in coincidences and hope in love’s possibilities, the girl who trusts in transcendent mythic journeys, and believes in signs, portents, and spiritual dimensions, the manic, elated producer of an overflowing fountain of art and poetry that can only come from pure soul-pervading that is a more practical self. It’s the “me” that knows the gig is up no matter what we do, at least in this world.

Then, another aspect joins in the chorus of the ever-churning mind: the sardonic, cynical smartass in me knows that fate will wink when sheer weeks before running out of air to breathe and the whole of us choking on atoms of manufactured plastic crap clogging our lungs, a sun storm will gobble us up the way thousands of planets disappear into the sun all the time. A natural, cosmic occurrence of gases and flames will make moot our bent on self-destruction.

Oops, so much for trying.

So what’s the point then, you ask? What’s the point of getting up in the morning and reveling in thankfulness for the clear, sunny day? What’s the point in going to work or school and fulfilling your potential? What’s the point in recycling or attending NA meetings? Why not fuel up on hydrogenated poisons? Why bother completing a painting, or giving life-saving surgery, or sponsoring a child in Ecuador?

I never understood clearly when I was a kid why my dad told me the reason for doing the right thing is simply because it is right. Simple, but hard for me to get a handle on. Dad: the reason you should do the right thing is because it is the right thing to do. Here as an adult, I’m still way too attached to the outcome. You can’t control shit, but you’re still 100 per cent responsible for the stuff you do. So do your damn best.

Responsible to whom, you ask? I can’t answer that. I may not believe what you do. But there’s right and wrong and though humans have never been good at figuring it out, there are a few we all agree on without argument- be kind to old ladies and don’t kill and torture people, for example. You may not be able to change what your politicians do, but asking them to do it is still your responsibility. What might happen if we all wake up and feel possibility and demand to stop the ridiculous greed and killing? The sun may still fulfill the prophecy that the world will not be destroyed by flood again-or it may not. But every day lived from here on in will be lived fuller, better, stronger, more amazing. I’m going to try my very best.

The friend who wrote how he is drowning in melancholy I have known for a long, long time, (he is now a Buddhist monk) and I know from his cycles that soon he will write with the understanding that occasional submerging in despair is a quiet, dark time of the soul that lies in wait of answers. Paul McCartney: “Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be, there will be an answer, let it be….”

My friend is on the other side of the world, and we are not able to be together right now on our divergent paths, but his thoughts mirror mine today as he writes, “ I cannot give up on spiritual life until I have exhausted every last possibility.”

Another of my most trusted spiritual advisors I have never met, brilliant thinker Thomas Moore, who wrote about despair in Dark Nights of the Soul. “Imagination is everything,” he reminds me in case my practical self doubted what my heart believes so wholly. “Because we can’t know or experience anything outside our imagination of it. But the imagination can be old, tired, and irrelevant. It needs to be revived continually.”

Lorette C. Luzajic
thegirlcanwrite.net
you can order my book through amazon or indigo online!

Reading Thomas Moore’s A Life at Work

Middle age looms astonishingly near for a writer who built a brand on the nickname ‘The Girl.” Though I do not fear the wisdom that they say will make an appearance, few would describe me as mature or settled! I often joke that my youngest brother, now 23, is ‘finally my age.’ And once again, my teacher Thomas Moore can read my every molecule with a clarity I seldom possess.

“Some people get caught up in the Icarus syndrome at one point in their lives; others are perpetually like him- full of desire, somewhat reckless, and lost in their ideals. Often, too, they crash into a depression or some failed project and become disillusioned. Then they oscillate between grand ideas and failed experiments,” Moore writes in his new book, A Life at Work: The Joy of Discovering What You Were Born to Do.

On and on he goes, until I feel stark naked, but I’m not alone: I’m reading aloud to a friend I’ve always trusted as the more focused and pulled-together of our pairing. I’m reading to show myself- but he is seeing his own work, his crashing dreams, his amazing heights, his perceived failures.

Moore points out the glory of thinkers like Icarus: “…the spirit of Eternal Youth may give rise to idealism, inventiveness, enthusiasm, and a strong urge to be creative.” But the pitfalls are there to smash us mid-flight: “On the negative side, it is often unrealistic and wishful. At its core there often sits a smoldering narcissism- excessive self-regard, extreme self-consciousness….(he) thinks up one project after another and rarely completes any of them.”

I guess Moore has peeked right into my obsessive ‘list journals’ that I write on streetcars, in the bathtub, in the middle of church. “A writer of this type may have a box full of half-begun projects or a list of great ideas that will never be brought to fruition.”

Aha! See, there I go thinking it’s all about me…but perhaps the writer whom Moore refers to is Moore! In every book he gives us, Moore talks from his own experiences and his heart, both light and shadow. For years, I’ve taken comfort in knowing that my teacher was also taught by the great chaos and beauty of life. By now, Moore’s early dedication to life as a Catholic monk is legendary. He moved on to study music, to teach, to work in psychotherapy, and was still looking for his life’s work this whole journey. He became a family man later in life as well. Writing was something he did as expression of many of these things, and when he put his ideas about the soul into Care of the Soul, it was a smashing bestseller. Letters and reviews from people like myself poured in, marveling at Moore’s gift to reveal their life so eloquently.

It’s a great relief to myself, and to millions, to know that a man as talented and perceptive and ‘called’ as Moore watched life unfold in the same way we all do. Everyone expects a special stamp at 18 or 20: here’s your career, here’s your family, here’s your kids, here’s your future. But life unfolds in brilliant disorder: paths veer unexpectedly into another.

While this Icarus spirit seems like an uncommitted madman, my narcissism glows after the above bruising when Moore points out, “Out of all the visionary hopes and dreams may come brilliant ideas. The lives of inventors and artists are full of the struggle to get their novel ideas grounded in real life. A youthful spirit keeps you young and flexible. It may also be the basis of a fervent spirituality…”

I have a few other teachers, and one is an old friend I used to go raving with. It’s hard now to imagine us dressing up in brightly coloured plastic baubles and hitting the trance floor amid flashing lights and candy-coloured hallucinations. This phase passed, of course, as it does for most, and my younger friend went on to a life of religious dedication and became my own personal spiritual advisor. From the underground dance halls to the monastery seems a stretch, but isn’t. Both worlds sought to transcend life in search of spirit, to wade through illusions and come out with a different heart. This friend left the underground quickly, risking everything he knew as stable to become ordained as a Buddhist monk. He studied political science and graduated very young, then went on to Tibet, Laos, India, Thailand, Taiwan and New Zealand to work and pray in various monasteries. Additionally, he had to learn something of each language in order to pray and teach where he was. This kind of devotion and dedication is way too hard for most of us. I do not possess it.

The monk’s work or vocation, his calling, was clear from the beginning, and decidedly respectable. But oddly enough, his teachings always demanded that I embrace the very chaos I kept hoping to escape. The spiritual books he recommended, by beautiful authors like Pema Chodron, insisted that the midst of chaos was the midst of reality, and in my whirlwind life of big ideas and crashing dreams, of friends dropping dead like flies, of small triumphs and major travesties, I was an honorary Buddhist! Life is unfolding, he would tell me. Accept it.

Another teacher has been with me from the beginning. My father is a man who is unwavering in his literalist dedication to Christianity. He has lived in the same house, married to my mother, and worked at one job from which he retired 40 plus years later. He is the epitome of stability. Yet he also counsels me that life is unfolding. Once, when I expressed my distress that I was not yet a famous writer, he chuckled and said, “Your life’s not over yet.”

This brings me back round to A Life at Work- where Moore gently prods us to our calling, and shows us that our calling may not be a giant, world-dominating blaze of glory, and it may not be one specific thing. He asks us to watch carefully and let it unfold instead of suppressing it, to gently coax it from the ordinary moments, to wait for it through the tragic. He reminds us never to belittle our calling- we might be very good at a perfectly respectable thing like cleaning hospitals or selling shoes. Every contribution is important.

Moore always finds a way to bring in some of his favourite topics like alchemy, and he illustrates how we mix and temper our past experiences, good and bad, with our hopes for future possibilities. He shows us how to come to terms with our work past- from the mundane to the once glorious and failed. He shows us how to remain open to the opus we may not yet see patterning in our lives. He doesn’t say a word about how to make a resume or impress a corporation we’re hoping to move into. Instead, he gently gardens through our soul and reminds us that whatever we have planted or grown or lost, our life is not over yet.

A Life at Work: The Joy of Discovering What You Were Born to Do
Broadway Books (Random House), New York, 2008.

Visit the author of Care of the Soul, Soul Mates, The Soul of Sex, The Soul’s Religion, and The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life at www.careofthesoul.net.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Here’s what Thomas Moore said about Lorette’s poetry collection: “Your book of poems is wonderful. I like the style very much. Imaginative, witty, blessedly free of normal logic, surprising, profound, very human, touching, sassy. I like them and thank you for sending them. Looking forward to the next book.”

You, too, will enjoy The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, so please visit my site to order, or order online through indigo or amazon.