Conversations with a Soul (21 page)

Meet an early prototype of a whale.

The strange, savagely toothed
creature started its career lounging in lagoons from where it lunged at prey walking too close to the water’s edge.

. . . its four hundred pound body – an enormous crocodile-like head, a wide chest and long tail sat on squat legs. . . The width of its chest pushed its hands out to either side like seal flippers . . . the spine strongly suggests that Ambulocetus could have arched its back as it pushed out its giant hind legs and driven the force of its kick out to the end of its tail.
⁵⁹

Certainly not one of your more cuddly pets!

Over millions of years it developed a taste for fish, which were much easier to catch than things with legs. A world bounded by water became the creature’s home, and its body gradually changed to accommodate to the demands of being an oxygen breathing being living in a world defined by water.

I read that seals probably evolved in a similar manner, owing their existence to a now long extinct land creature, possibly a species of bear and that one branch of whales, having done most of the hard evolutionary work required to cross from land and survive in the ocean, went on to evolve into dolphins.

Slowly, painstakingly, measured in millions of years, life emerged from the sea to populate land, and then from land some of the creatures re-crossed the frontier and returned to make their home in a water world. That narrow zone, marked by the marriage of sea and shore, is the most magnificent and mysterious of all frontiers. It’s a union that made possible a journey, which in the many drafts of evolution, sculpted life in all its different and varied wonders.

Frontiers come in many shapes and sizes.

Traditionally we employ the word in a geographical context; marking off the border of a piece of land with which we are familiar from that which is unfamiliar, mysterious, possibly even dangerous, or perhaps, just perhaps, magical. Sometimes driven by necessity, sometimes by enticement, the urge to make discoveries and cross frontiers is rooted deep within.

In medieval maps, north was equated with hope, perhaps because in the north there was so little known, so much possible. Even in the nineteenth century, the great blank expanse of the ‘Frozen Sea’ could offer hope, because it was a place where limitations had not been set. It was a place where hope could live – the land of the mythical Hyperborean, the ‘happy people’ from beyond the north wind, who Pliny tells us ‘have long life and are famous for many marvels which border on the fabulous.’ Even long before Pliny, adventurous seafarers had set their sails for the misty northern islands – perhaps the Shetlands, perhaps somewhere further.
⁶⁰

When you and I were very young and driven to explore, we too set our sails for the unknown, for we lived in a world created by frontiers each of which beckoned to us and ignited our curiosity:

The pots and pans cupboard, then the front door, then the garden gate, then the sidewalk, then the neighbourhood, then the park, then the playground, then the school, then another town, then the campus, then a place that offered a job, then yet another town, or city or country.

Growing from infancy to adulthood was all about frontiers; and as frontier after frontier was crossed and mapped and recorded, our world became both bigger and bigger and also smaller and smaller until, like seasoned explorers, we developed a comfortable familiarity with
our
place.

Some of our companions chose to put down roots, content to convert a place into a home. Others, more restless, were driven on by the need to journey over one more mountain, or see the sun set on another shore, or explore the wonders of living in a different kind of community.

I have often felt that if I lived to be a hundred, I would still yearn to see and explore one more place, for nothing stirs my blood or tantalizes my imagination like the mysterious call sent out by somewhere I
have never been before! Yet whether we settle down or yield to the urge to journey on, we never really come to an end with frontiers and borders, for until the day we face the final frontier, we continue to be explorers.

Journeys through the world
around
us almost always initiate journeys through the world
within
us. Every physical frontier, every exploration, and every destination has the power to invite clusters of mental and emotional frontiers to come and be present, where they take up residence and clothe themselves in deceptively simple questions:

'
Will they like me; can I manage on my own; is it safe to be myself here; where do I fit in; would they still care about me if they really knew me; is it okay to cry?'

Exploring physical frontiers is one thing, answering those simple questions is a far more complex enterprise. So powerful and pressing is that exploration that most of us spend a lifetime trying to frame an answer and in the process learn to come to terms with ourselves. Sometimes we recognized that wrapped up in these questions are hints about what it means to be alive, fully alive and engaged! The questions beckon and push and invite the thrill of discovery, even as they sometimes demand great courage, for to engage questions like these, is to invoke the fearsome gods of uncertainty.

Aweigh the anchor!

Cast off aft and forward!

Stand by to hoist the fore and main sails for the wind and tide are ready to carry us away!

With a loud snap the sails capture the morning breeze and stretch tight, thrusting us forward and away. Slowly but inexorably the safety and security of the quayside falls ever further away. There can be no going back.

But who knows where the ship is headed?

Equipped with a new leather satchel, standard kit for all first graders, and provisioned with hard-boiled egg sandwiches, the yokes of which stick in my throat, I am on an exploration.

Even today, years later, the smell of hard-boiled egg mingled with the smell of leather still has the power to take me back.

This is my first day! I am a newbie and I do as I am told!

I line up in front of the classroom with the purple door, alongside the classroom with the yellow door, into which my friend Digby had disappeared.

The desk to which I am assigned is somewhere in the middle of the room on the right hand side. I sit behind a girl who wears glasses and in front of a boy who has gaps where his front teeth are supposed to be. My teacher’s name is Miss Whitman.

She is a goddess in disguise!

She has the ability to make or break my day by casting spells, for which she requires only a few simple words and a warm smile.

Thus begins my first day in school, and the crossing of a mysterious frontier that will take me far from the life I have known up to this point. I surrender my freedom and toys for rules, books and pencils.

Over the next few days I explored this new territory, and in short order found my way to the bathrooms and the playground, the assembly hall, lockers, and the torture chamber occupied by the school principle, whose acquaintance I hoped never to have to make. Before the week was over, my preliminary explorations were completed. I had examined and mapped most of the territory enclosed within the school fence, but the journey was only just beginning!

Towards the end of the first week, Digby explained to me that the bathrooms were
far more
important than merely a facility for purposes of personal hygiene. They offered a refuge within which you could hide when the older kids decided it was time you underwent initiation by upending you into one of the school trash cans; or, even worse, when the bullies decided to pick on you.

Suddenly I was confronted by an altogether different frontier. I had stumbled into a territory ruled over by those who wielded power and used it to humiliate anyone who had none. It was not so much the issue of a physical confrontation, although that was present. Rather, it was the issue of power. Who, in this far country, had the power to humiliate and hurt me? Who could force me to bend to their will? In front of all the kids whose respect and friendship I yearned to win, who had the right to debase and demean me?

Now I had to learn how to cope with an internal reality characterized by fear. Without understanding the psychological nuances I was thrust into the choice of standing up for myself, with whatever that might entail, or surrendering to the wretched existence of a victim and a life characterized by terror.

I learned too that recess and the playground offered a wonderful alternative to sitting at my desk. Yet even here, even as I ran yelling and shouting the moment the bell rang and I could escaped the tyranny of the classroom, something deep within forced me to confront other frontiers: learning how to make and keep friends, how to deal with loneliness, and how to recover from the pain of being excluded. My sense of self-worth was jostled and pummelled, even though I could never have described the experience without an outpouring of emotion, something strongly discountenanced by fearless first graders.

Suddenly frontiers and borders and explorations were to be faced outside of the safety and security of my home and more often than not there was no one to rescue me.

The physical journey was just up the road and through the school gate; the mental and emotional ones were far more complex and seem to go on long after school days were over.

The tyrants faced on the playground have reappeared throughout my life and brought with them the fear of defeat and the yearning to stand tall inside. The borders and frontiers posed by ‘life on the playground’ were simply a precursor to life everywhere else. The world about and the world within is crisscrossed with physical and mental borders and frontiers, every one of them demanding a response.

Announced and inspired by the kelp I came to see my life as quintessentially a story molded and inspired by the frontiers I had crossed, or still waited to cross; frontiers I had skirted, frontiers that should never have been crossed and frontiers which I had joyously and with gleeful abandon dared to cross that led me to life and renewal.

In truth we are all a tale of frontiers.

Every life is a tale of border crossings and adventures as demanding as any faced by Polar explorers or legendary frontier’s men or women. Each of our personal biographies is like a vast library recording tales of discovery and heroism; borders crossed or borders avoided, glorious moments of great courage and also of abject cowardice. Through each intersection we’ve learned the skills of survival; we’ve shaken off the paralysis of failure, for we are explorers and the adventure goes on!