I've never actually posted anything someone else wrote.  Today, I am breaking with tradition because I can't imagine words more beautiful and touching to the places I've been to lately.  I have broken open and am emerging in a way that takes my breath away.  Every hour brings me new life and new breath and a greater, broader understanding and compassion for the journey I've been on and the life ahead of me.  As synchronicity so often does.... I've opened up a book by Elizabeth Lesser called "BROKEN OPEN".  I am posting a chapter she's written in the book that has touched me tremendously.

The Rapture of Being Alive

From the book Broken Open by Elizabeth Lesser

"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life.  I don't think that's what we're really seeking.  I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive... so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive"

~ Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell spent more than half a century mining the wisdom repositories of religion, myth and art.  At the end of Campbell's long career, when Bill Moyers asked him about the meaning of life, Campbell surprised Moyers by saying that it isn't meaning people have been seeking down through the ages, but something he called "the rapture of being alive".  After years of not only research but also participation in organized religious traditions and indigenous rites of passage, Campbell affirmed that each human being - whether from ancient Greece, or tribal Africa, or modern American - is not really hankering for a special vocation or an Earth-saving mission or some scholarly understanding of enlightenment.  Rather, what we want are vibrant, full-bodied experiences of being alive.  And if a desire to serve humanity or to find God comes from a rapturous engagement with life, then our service and our search will bear fruit.  But if we try to love or lead or work or pray from a dry well, then we will serve a bitter cup to those around us and never really live the life we were given.

When I look at the pinched faces of television evangelists or the rigid bodies of angry activists marching in mobs, I want to take them aside and rub their shoulders, wipe the furrows from their brows, feed them something delicious and make them laugh.  I want to say, "It doesn't have to be so intense, so fierce, so acrimonious.  You can work to ease the ills of society, and at the same time you can love the world with all of its sorrow and beauty.  You can serve your God without being so uptight about it.  You can feel the simple rapture of being alive and let that rapture be your North Star.  You can be led by a quiet joy."

It may seem that living for rapture is a selfish act reserved for the elite, or that it's a fancy phrase for hedonism.  But it isn't.  Rapture is not a selfish emotion.  It is pure gratitude, flowing freely through the body, heart and soul.  Gratitude for what?  For breath, for colors, for music, for friendship, humor, weather, sleep awareness.  It is a willing engagement with the whole messy miracle of life.  The world suffers more from unhappy, stifled people trying to do good than it does from those who are simply content within themselves.

In the end, it is the people at home in their own human skins - people who love the wounded world and its broken family - who can move mountains when called out of themselves and into a work in the world.  The founders of the great religions were such people.  Their ability to heal and awaken the masses sprang first and foremost from their personal experiences of being broken open.  Every great hero - past and present - took a difficult journey of self-awareness before finding his or her rapture.  Buddha spent several years alone in the forest, where he grappled with suffering.  His enlightenment has illuminated the path for millions of others.  Jesus broke from traditions, left his family and community and went into the desert for forty days and nights, as the Hebrew prophets did before him.  In the forest, in the desert, they confronted their inner demons and there they found themselves.  What they sought to right in the world, they righted first within their own hearts, and in doing so gained humility and authenticity.  They went deep into the darkness - into an acceptance and transformation of their own capacity for sin - and emerged with a rapture that was theirs forever.

How odd that if we reject what is painful we find only more pain, but if we embrace what is within us - if we peer fearlessly into the shadows - we stumble upon the light.  "Once, as we were discussing the subject of suffering", Bill Moyers said about his conversations with Campbell, "he mentioned in tandem James Joyce and Igjugarjuk."  "Who is Igjugarjuk?", I said, barely able to imitate the pronunciation ‘Oh', replied Campbell, ‘ he was the shaman of the Caribou Eskimo tribe in Northern Canada.  The one who told European visitors that the only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and can be reached only through suffering".

The great loneliness - like the loneliness a caterpillar endures when she wraps herself in a silky shroud and begins the long transformation from chrysalis to butterfly.  It seems that we too must go through such a time, when life as we have known it is over - when being a caterpillar feels somehow false and yet we don't know who we are suppose to become.  All we know is that something bigger is calling us to change.  And though we must make the journey alone, and even if suffering is our only companion, soon enough we will become a butterfly, soon enough we will taste the rapture of being alive.

I have a card stuck on my refrigerator that shows a woman standing in reverence before an open freez3er door, saying "Amazing!  Perfect ice cubes again!"  That's the kind of simple rapture I am talking about.  I realize we are not put on this earth to stand around open freezers ranting like idiots about ice cubes.  But a good question to ask yourself is this:  If perfect ice cubes or an evening sky or an old song on the radio has not made your heart flip-flop lately, why not?  What is keeping you from feeling the rapture?  I can assure you, you won't find the answer in a lighted room.  What stands between you and a full-bodied life can be found only in the shadows.  What wants to live in you may be waiting - as it was for me - at the end of a long loneliness.