REFLECTIONS ON MY DISSOLUTION
Dissolution, and I am using the term following Bill Plotkin, is simply no fun. Dissolution is what happens in between stages of our psychospiritual development e.g. from Early Adolescence to Late Adolescence, or from Late Adulthood to Early Elderhood. We start feeling squeezed in where we are in our lives. What was comfortable becomes uncomfortable, what felt wide and open becomes narrow and constricted. What was once the fertile grazing lands of Goshen where Joseph mythically settled our ancestors becomes Egypt, mitzrayim, the narrow place.
This is what is happening to me right now. Not that I ever enjoyed living in suburbia, but I chose it as the best possible path to raise a Jewish family given both who I and my wife were. It was comfortable in the way American life can be if you have money. It was certainly well known; I’d grown up in suburbia and the home I’ve lived in the past decade had a big lot with woods in the backyard, just like the house I grew up in. Plus I was back in a pretty comparable ecosystem after being in exile in the Pacific Northwest, an ecosystem that literally made my skin crawl.
But after I mostly retired and the focus on raising my kids and working with the local Jewish day school faded, I accelerated my search for alternatives. I was some odd combination of disgruntled and a little overwhelmed, but I was only teetering on dissolution.
Plotkin writes “You are a seeker but cannot decipher. You can cooperate but you can’t make it happen. You are not a solver [what we would like to do JG] but that which gets dissolved. (Journey to Soul Initiation p.71). Dissolution is a psychospiritual death and severance from what has been in order to make room for the new. But what’s really tricky is that while you shed your old identity in order to make room for something new, that something new doesn’t arrive immediately. You wander in the world without a clear identity. That’s very disorienting.
In my experience the temptation is to fall back into old ways of being. So I find myself slipping back into the guy who can run organizations and money, but that’s just not who I want to be anymore. But who am I, if I am not that? I teach and write these days, just like I am doing now in this blog, but there’s a big part of me that feels like I am dabbling, not fully committed. What would it feel like to be fully committed? What would that open up for me? What would I have to let go of in order to be that way?
What I know is that in order to answer these questions, I have to let myself go into this betwixt and between period where I no longer know who I am. I have to have faith that I will come out the other end.
On the one hand, that faith is not that hard. I’ve been here before and I’ve come out of periods of dissolution before. I also in this case know something of where I am headed (or at least think I am) of being a teacher of Animist Earth Based Judaism. I know some tricks to keep myself grounded. Spend as much time as possible in the more than human world. Walk a lot, even in iffy weather. Connect with worked agricultural land with gardening and spending time on pastures with cows (I just have to find that here). Be gentle with myself.
But on the other hand, dissolution, by its very nature, is disorienting. For me at least, there’s always that question of will I really come through it, or will I retreat in the familiar, the comfortable, the way I already know to lead my life? I am blessed to have a really clear marker about who is showing up. Is it vulnerable, Animist, earth based Jewish Jared? Or is it board member, executive director, protected Jared?
