The Teeming World
Heroic Journey Series: The Liberating Blade
Song-n-Delve’s have been rare lately, as I’m squirrelling away recording the next EP (July release). But I felt called to put this one out there as a New Year meditation on the Heroic journey. From the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a poem so razor sharp and staggeringly deep in insight. I’ve put it to music and offer it as an instalment in my Heroic Journey series.
The knight rides forth
Don your armour. (You’re going to need it.) Get out into the world. Take charge of your fate. Get a seat at the table. Claim new heights. Make it. Feast! Make hay as the sun shines!
The hero / heroine sets out, having discovered and built the strengths required to navigate the teeming world. Beliefs get built around these strengths. This is the way to make it: Being strong. Being nice. Being smart. And they work! (Thank you strengths!) And they have their downsides. The ‘shadow’ side to the strengths: Being strong, overplayed, turns to violence. Being nice, overplayed, shuts down your power. Being smart, overplayed, shuts down your heart.
The strengths have got us to where we are.
But will they get us to where we want to go?
The strengths are gifts. They also have costs and consequences. This paradox is hard to hold.
The liberating blade
The hero / heroine meets a merlin. Or a Yoda. (Perhaps even a poet.) This teacher helps us see that our most prized strengths strangely become a prison of sorts. This is a disruptive moment. The piercing of the armour is painful. The shadow of the strength is hard to acknowledge, because the strengths have such currency in our life story. But the longing to be whole sees us through. The psyche moves toward balance. There are selves within, with things to say worth hearing. There are new and unexpected adventures to be had, equipped with the capabilities built so far, but free of the weight of all that armour.
Watch the song and delve; you get so much more with the sound and the song because it activates a different part of the brain than the reading faculty does. And for the reading brain here’s the poem (without the song and delve):
The Knight rides forth in coat of mail
Into the teeming world
Outside his armour, everything awaits:
The vines in the vale
And friend and foe, and the feast in the hall,
And the maids in May, and the glen and the grail;
And God himself in a thousand forms
found along every road.
But inside his armour, darkly enclosing him
Death crouches.
Inside his armour, the thought comes and comes again.
"When will a blade pierce this iron sheath?”
The underserved and liberating blade
That will fetch me from my hiding place where I’ve been so long compressed
So at last I might stretch my wings and hear my full voice expressed.
Also in the heroic journey series
For lovers of the poetry of Dao, here’s a treasure-packed story about the creative spirit and getting to work.
Dragon & Treasure: Face dragon. Get gold.
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