A Shaggy-Dog Story

A Shaggy-Dog Story

So … there’s this “bar”, into which walk four anthroposophists, … but what is a “bar” … a place where folks drown their sorrows? A meeting place for those who don’t want to sleep alone that night? Maybe there are secret meetings, illicit funds or other objects of value changing hands. Spies and rebels come to “bars” to plot.

Each human being has their own door into this bar. It is called, my heart. Wonders go through, move around, come back, throw up barriers, fall off of cliffs, down holes, crawl under the rug, vomit in the bathroom, a whole zoo of metaphors for pain.

A shaman’s self-question: of what, in the Dark, am I afraid?

On my door are a bunch of post-it notes. On both sides. It has a quality like a geographic record … layers, upon layers, with some fully obscured.

When I first learned of the richness of the spiritual gifts offered the world by Steiner and Friends, both incarnate and otherwise, part of me was troubled. What does it mean that only a few know this “new revelation”?

I was not inclined to Doubt the Wisdom of the Mystery, so the question grew questions about what was Truly going on around in the bars of most of the rest of the humanity. I – on occasion – believe I need a fix? A treasure to share? An addiction? A need for recognition?

A “bar” is also a place to have a party. Intoxicants, and dancing and loud music.

The bar-door of the heart has wounds, and broken places. Still, there always is a bar-tender, a listener to tales. A sacred relationship, its Rites a Sacrament. Prayer.

In some parts of the bar, are folk who are on their knees. In corners-infinite, the arguments of the wise become entombed in books. What is in the books?

Memory.

Memory is an aspect of the eight gates to Faerie, that come in pairs: e.g. Remembering and Forgetting. If we self-observe our own inward gestures, as our attention moves from one phase memory to the other, on the borderland of this pair is the Door to another Bar. A magical door. It is not on this page, … on “this” page: it is written in Babylon 5, “what the heart wants, the heart wants”, “the calling of the heart” and, “all love is unrequited”.

“Unrequited love or one-sided love is love that is not openly reciprocated or understood as such by the beloved. The beloved may not be aware of the admirer’s deep and strong romantic affection, or may consciously reject it.”

Is a Facebook group, like Anthroposophy for example, a doorway to the heart? Can we hurt another with words – carried by numbers – expressed in codes and clouds of misunderstanding?

Possibly. Depends on how vulnerable we chose to be, or are by nature.

Does the Mystery hover over, beneath, and around us when we are – to another – dark lines on a page? Are we seen here?

Probably not.

Sometimes these kinds of places are like a school room where the teacher is absent, and the children run amok, making paper airplanes, and spit-wads to throw at each other. Keep in mind that a ruckus is often a sign of life.