What is Spirit?

What is Spirit?

by Richard Strozzi-Heckler, author of Embodying the Mystery

My quest to understand the mystery that is human life began with the influence of my grandmother’s early teachings on the nature of spirit. Along the way, there were a number of significant teachers and events that opened a view into a way of being that had no previous location in my life.

My new book Embodying the Mystery explores the significant occurrences throughout my life that instilled me with somatic wisdom. These signposts and confirmations of a spiritual landscape, both inner and outer, pointed to an ineffable mystery that was alive and potent. The following is one of my earliest encounters with the mystery of life, death, and spirit, excerpted from the book.

When I was eight years old I would routinely explore the woods that were on the perimeter of the navy base that was my home. I would travel with a group of friends and on one particular day we decided to go to a creek far away from our usual haunts. As we cleared the thick hardwood forest we saw something lying in the gravelly shallows. It was a large yellow dog, yet even at a distance I could tell there was something untoward about it. It was completely still, unlike anything I had ever seen before and nearly indescribable. There was a profound silence emanating from it that utterly disregarded my reality of what I knew a dog to be. The stillness was full of import and something entirely unknown to me.

We walked slowly forward and saw that it was dead; freshly dead. There were no marks on it, no trauma, nothing to indicate that it was either sick or old or had died violently. Some of the other boys poked at it with a stick or threw pebbles at it. I was fully mesmerized. It looked like a dog sleeping, but something was missing. It was what was missing that captured me.

That evening, when I told my mother and grandmother what I had seen, my mother immediately went into a germ story: “You shouldn’t go near it. It might be diseased. You don’t want to touch it. Did you touch it?”

“It looked like it was sleeping, but it wasn’t. What was that?” I asked.

My grandmother nodded, “Its spirit was gone.”

“It might have germs. Don’t go back,” my mother interrupted, ignoring my grandmother. “Promise me you won’t go back. I don’t want you to get a disease.”

I went back the next day.

This revealed a characteristic of my nature that bucks authority. It also foreshadowed a tendency to refrain from fully disclosing my intentions so I could do what I wanted. This became a standard way for me to navigate the complexities of my family dynamic and supported my penchant for adventure.

I gently touched the dog first with a stick and then with my finger. It felt intimate, yet impersonal. It looked like a dog, but what made it a dog was no longer present. It was a house without a resident; a vacant body and a doorway to the unknown.

What is a spirit? Where is a spirit? When my grandmother spoke of it, it seemed so tangible and commonsensical, no more mysterious than taking off a shoe. Yet it was ineffable; it had no real location but existed everywhere. Her response ignited something in me like a second heartbeat, a distinctive pulse that permeated everything. A mystery had been presented that was enigmatic, seemingly unsolvable, yet as tangible as the next breath. These questions I would wonder about for the rest of my life. Right up to this moment of tapping these keys.

As if in a spell I went back to the creek every day, often alone. I was captivated; my curiosity was like magnetic filings embedded in my marrow, and the dog was pulling me forward to something formless, unknown. This was an urge that was larger than me; a flood of sensation that had its own way with me apart from any conscious choice. This was not a hankering after a simple desire, like a candy bar, but something I now know was a spiritual hunger, a charge of aliveness that began at the center of my chest and seemed to usurp the “me” that was accustomed to making mental choices. This feeling, this longing, pulled me as a river would and formed a new reality composed of the intimate connection between life and death. A great circle of change and transformation played out before me in real time. And I was enthralled by the mystery of it.

I began to see that what looked like a dog began to sag and was eventually reduced to an unnameable mass that repealed everything it had ever been. A dark premonition sharpened my senses and silhouetted the depth and granularity of my longing. What began to take shape in the core of my being was an understanding that the covenant of spirit was intimately matched with the vulnerability of the incarnate life. Death, loss, change, and birth were deeply woven into the fabric of Spirit and mystery. What came to form would pass.

In my daily treks to what I called Dog Creek, I was shown how endings were accompanied by new beginnings. There was something perpetually wanting to come to form out of the ending I was witnessing at the creek. As the days passed the stillness of the dog was replaced by a relentless shimmering laced into the very animal itself: hordes of ants, spiders, maggots, and things that looked like spastic black apostrophes were colonizing the dog. Then gaping holes in the hide appeared, showing putrefaction and rib. The fluted sound of the creek folded into the song of the crickets, tree frogs, and whip-poor-wills; a background symphony to the theater of change. Ravens sat watching in the gloom of overhead boughs, waiting to return to their task once I left.

I was alone in the sense of not being with another human, but I was never lonely. There is aliveness, too, in these exacting moments of ending. Movement became stillness, which became movement in the unending wheel of life expressed. By week’s end the dog was only a suggestion of what it once was, becoming a ripple in the current itself. The smell was bracing; the reek of death, caught in my nose, insisting on its place in every breath.

Life fastened to death. Instead of calling it living and dying should it be termed livingdying, just as in China they don’t say yin and yang but yinyang? Is Spirit the thread that unifies death and birth?

A peculiar entropy now appeared everywhere I looked, everything dissolved back into a larger preexisting order that was without nostalgia or sentimentality. There was an unnameable darkness that I couldn’t touch orbiting around me. This ceremony of ruin and renovation is best viewed at a distance; up close it’s difficult to see its dark gift. Deep in my tissues, where this primal opening to life, to Spirit, was twined with death, a central theme about existence appeared: there is a polarity endlessly acting on itself and the world, opening and closing, receiving and giving, living and dying, flexing and extending, lighting and shading, making and unmaking. As Ovid said, “Everything is changing into something else.”

Is the interacting of these polarities the engine that creates the whole, the direct, unmediated experience of unity? Is this the womb out of which there is a ground of being that holds this polarity? Is there something deeper and wider that has the space to hold opposites, contradictions, paradoxes?

The in-your-face actuality of decay revealed a shadow that hovered over everything that accompanied me as I walked the trail home. Every opening was preceded by a contraction. There was an animating principle, a spirit, that invoked a metamorphosis, a constantly changing fabric that included disintegration and renewal. Conspicuously, life feeds off life, life is Spirit, and in that tension there is a mystery that calls for surrender to something larger than the duality of subject and object.

As I stood in the clearing I wondered if the horizon, gigantic as it seemed, was big enough to hold these seeming opposites. Something massed at the edge of my skin that reached for the depthless sky, an inexplicable quality of relentless loss felt and known deeply, and of relentless life that surges in widening circles where thought cannot follow. Life is not a pouch of gold coins that we must spend prudently and not all at once. Life is infinite; it doesn’t run out. Yes, I will run out of life just as we all will, but the world will never run out of life. As the poet Mary Oliver so elegantly states, “These are the woods you love,/ where the secret name/ of every death is life again.” The shadow side of love is loss.

I studied our dog Bailey as he slept, looking intently for signs of a spirit and what was the same as or different from the dog in the creek. When Bailey slept his ears would twitch, and he’d scrabble his feet on the floor in the ancient dream of the hunt. His chest would rise and fall without interruption. Even when sleeping an animation flowed through him like water over cobblestones. Thousands of tiny creatures snacked and lived on the dog in the creek without the slightest tremor from him, only a final quiet that conveyed an unfathomable emptiness.

I brought the same curiosity to the guppies in our small aquarium with their unhesitating darts to the food sprinkled on the surface of the water. Occasionally I was offered the contrast of a single guppy floating lifeless on the surface as the others continued their random dashing. Yes, the theme of movement certainly repeated itself as a differentiation between spirit and no spirit, but it was not always reliable. When I scrutinized the flowers in the kitchen vase I looked for spirit in the flush of the rhododendron as well as the petals that fell from the stem to the yellow linoleum table. There was no movement in either of them, yet something radiated from them that whirred with aliveness. When I asked my grandmother about the where and how of Spirit she would say emphatically, “Spirit is everywhere. Just look!”

Spirit is not a thing, a concept, a symbol, or a good idea. Spirit is a process in which the dynamics of polarities acting in concert with each other produce a life force that is emergent, evolutionary, transformative, and embodied, organizing itself toward the affirmation of life. In this process there is the potential to be touched by pragmatic wisdom, grounded compassion, and skillful action. Spirit is a feeling that has texture, intent, and force; a gravitas that constantly feeds on itself and replenishes itself. Life saying yes to itself.