“If You Want to Kiss the Sky

Better learn how to kneel.”

I’ve always loved this lyric by U2. As time goes on, it reveals itself in different ways to me. Bono has an inspiring open-ended way of layering meaning and presenting each song as a gift to be opened again and again.

This lyric from “Mysterious Ways”, highlights the paradox of what we must do to do what we wish, where we must go to get where we want to be.

Reverence is the path to ecstasy.

Humility, the road to glory.

There is no getting to the top without going to the bottom.

I have spent a good chunk of my life intensely researching and experimenting with how to skip Step One. Step Two is just so much more attractive. Who doesn’t want to skip the agony of defeat part?

Problem is, without bowing down, even the random moments of glory feel oddly suspended, like a bubble.

Fabulous, but fragile and fluky.

Occasionally in life, you come to a crossroads.

A place beyond which you cannot travel farther without changing. If you’re the kind of person committed to growing, it is almost a relief, because there is really no choice. Finally, the risk to stay the same is greater than the risk to change.

This is where I am.

Over the past, say two months, I have been kneeling a lot. Giving up what is most comfortable and familiar. Sugar, concrete plans, running the show.

Giving up believing that I know the way. The best most efficient and productive process to get things done, the smartest approach to my own creativity.

Giving up control. Giving up my sense of safety.

Mostly, this feels terrifying, freaky and like I have completely lost my mooring.

I cry a lot and feel untethered from the dock of my identity.

However, there is a strange sense too, of being pulled in a new direction. Inside the not knowing, is a comforting sense that there is a greater knowing. One beyond me that holds me.

My manic tendencies have subsided into trust.

Often I don’t trust this trust, because, I am crazy.

But the 30% of my day that it is present, is so much more powerful and peaceful than the other 70%, I am still listening.

Kung Fu Panda 3 had a similar message.

We saw it this past weekend and it had a profound effect on me, as did the other two.

In each movie, Po, the Kung Fu Panda, is called to dramatically shift his identity. He thinks he knows who he is. And then the universe informs him of a far different destiny.

A kind of Zen DreamWorks carpenter-to-savior story.

He feels overwhelmed and does not know how to become who he is supposed to be.

In the first movie, Po goes from being a fat panda who works at his dad’s noodle shop to discovering he is The Dragon Warrior. No pressure.

He has no idea how to be this new iteration of himself.

In the second film, he finds out he is adopted. He loses his way, his identity and his power, just as he is about to fight the evil peacock, who nightmare flashbacks reveal killed his mother.

He fights his way to peace and acceptance of this new identity.

In this last movie he is asked to become a teacher.

He thinks he is supposed to be a teacher of Kung Fu. He proves to be terrible. Then, he discovers he is the only one who can save the world, using his chi. But he doesn’t know how to use his chi.

Po feels like a failure to himself, his fellow warriors and the entire community. Confused, he seeks advice from Master Shifu, who says,

“I am trying to turn you into you.”

The movie has a wonderfully redemptive ending in which Po manages, yet again, to reinvent himself. It is a big question, this Who Am I? Made more challenging by the fact that who we are changes.

There are the names we are given, names we are called, and names we seek to be. Those related to business: employee, CEO, assistant. Those related to talents: singer, athlete, artist. Those related to family, mother, sister, daughter, wife, lover.

Some names we keep for life. Others morph and change.

To my mind, the most honest name we can give ourselves is Pilgrim.

A pilgrim is someone on a journey, whose ultimate destination is a coming home to one’s true self. Pilgrim suggests a nomadic quality of being.

And although we each settle into certain places and roles, sometimes for long periods of time, we are always called to reinvent our relationship with everything.

What does it mean to mother, to write, to cook, to live?