Unicorns Are Real
Rilke speaks of the inner life a lot in his poetry. “I love the dark hours of my being,” he croons. Oh, wow. What an affirmation of the truth! There’s a kind of feeling I get sometimes, and if I let myself, it can take over me for the whole of the day or even for ten thousand years. It happens if and when I have the courage to let go of the ropes that keep me moored to the field of being. If I let go, I can drift off gently into the world I inhabit most naturally, the imaginal world, where my life is just one of millions and billions of other living images — a happy throng of kinfolk that I rejoin without a backward glance.
When I don’t have the courage to let go, I remain in a kind of self-sustaining prison system where rope burns on my wrists and ankles and the constant gyrations of a prisoner seeking release aren’t enough motivation to push me forward. It’s like the state of one of those kidnap victims who fall in love with their captors. I must love the pain, I must love the fear. I must like being imprisoned. How else to explain the lack of courage? Because I don’t lack courage. In truth, I’m a fierce Lioness or an even fiercer She-Mountain Goat.
So what is it? What makes me tie my own ropes tighter? To what can I attribute my occasional bouts of delirium tremens that keep me tied up in a mental servitude to literalism about a life that is so clearly imaginal and insubstantial? Insubstantial here means lacking physical substance. Blood and guts and bones are not real, they just fade away and become dust. We all put way too much stock in material reality. It’s called scientific materialism and loads of people are convinced that unless you can prove the reality of something through scientific processes then that thing is not real. This type of thing is said with a straight face by people who will be nothing but dust in just a few short years.
You know what it is? It’s my ego. Nothing else in the human psyche cares about: “What will happen to me?” as much as the ego does. I’m convinced that it is only this one little part of consciousness that causes every single mishap we ever experience in our lives. All the other events that occur in life are necessary and purposeful, they have depth and are rich with meaning-making juices that help get us get nice and cooked with great flavorings. But because the ego wants to be in charge of everything and everyone all the time, it feels deeply uncomfortable in periods of uncertainty and change. And the truth is that for this human, yours truly, life has never been certain. My entire life is composed of a series of incredibly uncertain and unstable time periods represented by the countless times I have moved. I am close to fifty now and I have had forty-five different homes that I can remember. I think that being in a continual state of liminality is just my fate and this helps to explain why my ego gets all bent out of shape sometimes and manages this imaginal feeling of being tied up in ropes — the ropes are the ego, and the land beyond them is the freedom I seek, the freedom I have easy access to any time I want.
The silvery waters of my inner being, the sunrises and moonbeams in the field of flowers, the underground tunnels and the trolls they enclose, the cherry orchard where the unicorn lives, the slimy star-fish snails from my childhood dreams — these are a few of my favorite things. Images and the stories they tell have always been a big part of my life. I still live with images from dreams I had forty years ago.
My Zen teacher doesn’t like me to fantasize in this way. I’m meant to be satisfied with an ordinary human life. Everything else is delusion, and, even worse perhaps, delusions of grandeur. Just the ordinary everyday things are where the sacred already dwells. Even to call them sacred is a bridge too far, it seems. It’s just ordinary. But for the visionary mystic unicorns are ordinary because magic is ordinary. Magic is real and lasts longer than my bones ever will. I want to rip open my chest cavity and dig out all the confusion and all the fear and all the doubt. Then I want to throw it all into a pot and cook that stuff with some leeks and some onions and some fresh thyme. Just a couple of weeks ago a real unicorn appeared and touched my heart with the tip of her horn. I was purified. So how did all this gunk reappear around my heart center again in so short a time? Is it really real even? Maybe I’m imagining it (hahaha, that’s a Depth Psychology inside joke).
Today, the writing is coming in little spurts. Yesterday it came in torrents. Tomorrow maybe it will be something in between, something in between, just like all of us always are. There is no such thing as arriving at a final destination, none of us will ever stop traveling, we’ll never stop moving. Nothing is ever completely still, everything is in motion all the time. This is good news and bad news because the things we have that we like will be changing and moving along as they transform into something new, either through death or through just moving somewhere else, and the things we don’t like that we have will likewise be transforming into something new, hopefully into wisdom and an inner peace that comes with accepting the reality of impermanence. So, the ropes are impermanent, imprisonment is a delusion, and unicorns are real.
Now that’s all sorted, I can go live my sweet little life.
