Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past; turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame; confounds the saint with the rogue; shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside. Why then do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as the soul is present there will be power not confident but agent.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”
“This stone, it rocks,” I heard my friend say as I looked up at the gray cliff with a halo of green lichen. Thinking his statement was a play on words, I looked back to see what he meant. He was sitting on a sofa-sized boulder of Shawangunk Conglomerate. The megalith gently rocked in a delicate balance atop other boulders in the talus field.
“This is my church,” he said. “I’ve been coming here for decades, my entire life.”
The man had come to climb these cliffs for so long he knew the character of each spot beneath the cliff. The rock face’s features—roofs, dihedrals, aretes, and cracks—formed a wizened and sculptural design that looked like a mashup of a gothic cathedral replete with flying buttresses and gargoyles.
Though the man had visited this place, an hour’s walk from any road, a thousand times, he was not bored but rather emanated contentment. This was his sanctuary.
“I’ve put up hundreds of new rock-climbs here, sometimes four or five in a day. None of them are documented,” he explained. “I love launching up a rock face, not knowing what I will find, and following a path that no one has taken before.”
The encounter led me back to Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” an essay that blew my mind as a teenager, particularly a line hidden in the middle of a paragraph deep in the text: “Inasmuch as the soul is present there will be power not confident but agent.”
What, practically, does Emerson mean by the soul? How can this soul be present? How does the soul become? What is this power arising from its presence that does not evoke confidence, but agency? And finally, why does the world hate the fact of its arising?
I don’t know the answers to these questions, but something deep in my chest is called to inquire. I wish to know the life which avails. And to know before I am dead.
Emerson’s language suggests a praxis, a mode of striving that sacrifices the desire for success and fear of failure, that leaves off the need to prove anything to anybody and frees attention to fully engage with this perpetual moment of transition; a mode that eschews “repose.” Emerson seems to suggest that in this engagement the soul is invoked, and once present, becomes more deeply and fully itself.
This summer I’ve been rising at sunrise and walking barefoot along a mountain path. Sensing the rich texture of the stones, leaves, and earth underfoot I notice awareness expanding. I look up and see the trees glistening with the night’s rain, hear the birds and bugs rhythmic morning songs, thoughts settle down and I feel myself as a cell in a larger body.
The sound of rushing water grows louder as I approach a stream that pours down from a mountain lake and funnels into a narrow chasm of rock. Shedding clothes on the bank, I enter the water of the rushing artery all at once. I shiver and feel the chill and softness of the water on my skin. After some deep breaths, I submerge into the quiet depth. Once established below the water I relax completely and let the elemental quality of the water flow through my body and mind.
The simple reality of the elements serve as a polar attractor for deeper contact. I am invited to set aside everything I know about how things are and be touched by the qualities of rock, stream, breath, and flame.
If I accept the invitation to engage, and respond not passively, but with vigilant attention, I catch a glimpse of contact between my soul and the world. I see how readily this contact is interrupted by thoughts, desires, reactions. Nevertheless, I know it is the aim to which I must ceaselessly dart, an aim that springs from the inchoate wish rising like a vapor from deep within my breast.
This article appears in September 2023.
