Finding my Will at Dawn

A post-travel reflection

I have just returned from South Africa. The last three weeks were spent bearing witness to a mosaic of encounters and landscapes. This witnessing overturned something latent within myself–an unconsciousness around the deeper layers of my will, and further sight into the polarity of wealth and disparity at work within myself, as it is in all the world.

In South Africa, one lands at an airport that borders vast townships, where entire communities live in conditions that, in the West, we might call “undeveloped.” As you land in that country and drive to your dwelling, you must first pass poverty. This looks like thousands of shacks on sand. Walls and roofs are metal sheathes, bathrooms are porta-potties, and playgrounds are waysides.

What struck me to the core was that these communities rest at the foothills of the wealthiest mountains I have ever seen. I say wealthiest not to imply money, but beauty. The rock near Cape Town seems to burn with an inner fervor that comes straight from the center of the earth. I felt that the stone resides both anciently and presently, and mediates the relationship between the earth and cosmos with a powerful creative force that I have witnessed nowhere else in the world. The townships rest there.

Witnessing this invoked in me a feeling of abundance, like that of those mountains, regarding my own creative will, and, concurrent with that, an utter impasse. I felt that I could observe my own will’s potential, but go no further from there, as my own undeveloped nature sprawls the landscape of my being.

I had lunch with a family on one of these mountainsides who hadn’t been to a restaurant in two years. After eating, they welcomed us into their home with hospitality, and we sat in their small, stark setting and looked at each other. The surrounding community rang with the abundance of people on the street–children playing, adults lounging together in large groups. We looked at each other more. We were all trying to host something. Trying to arrange for the future.

What am I sacrificing by letting my will shrug off the responsibility to wake up to my place in the world? Because my place in the world has everything to do with those around me–their health and wellbeing, and the agreements we uphold. New agreements around money, land, and “resources” require creative will to begin.

This impasse between will and action has been there since my childhood. I knew then, in a more childlike way, that using my creative will requires continual entry into what could be described as the “dawning” potential of every moment in time, where the future can enter interaction, word, and thought. I felt, too, that this is not easy, nor encouraged by the conditions of modernity.

As a young child, I used to write out a new day for myself every day. I still have some of these little “lists” that, in crayon, forged a new path for play that day. Each day they vary, and one could say, “Where was her consistency or follow-through?” My creativity couldn’t yet enter the practical. As an adult, my Google Calendar boasts various meetings and work appointments weekly, and one might say, “What a rigid form to follow.” My creativity dissolves, and the task force takes precedence.

What is the real, true appointment that my creativity can fathom? What kind of thinking results from deeds done with integrity? As children, no day is “repeated,” really, and everything is done with integrity. But soaring into adulthood finds me ever aware of the cogs of my inner life, which turn in the machinery of the mundane. The impasse that is schedule, convention, and social seclusion, where awakenings are sidelined for the sake of routine.

Dawn is not only when the sun rises, or where and how, but when time begins. It is when we shift from sleep-consciousness to waking-day consciousness, where we enact our will on earth. Only there can “activism” take place. But negligence toward the dawn results in false activism. Then my doing is the result of the thought structures of yesterday, or the algorithms that my family and education taught me to live by, or the formulas of culture. There is real pain in encountering this deadness within myself in the face of the mighty tasks at hand.

I am back in New York today, and I walked with the sunrise today, and I am fumbling with my will today. I live in a beautiful community that cultivates healthy food, new forms of education, and a potentially “dawn-like” approach to the granularities of life in general. But there is still the incompleteness of our agreements around money and livelihood that permeates the globe. I am back with a crayon in hand and an empty piece of paper, trying to live in a world of abundance that has not yet entered into dawn. Dawn, where nothing that has come before can harass the new agreement, that this is a shared reality. Where a feeling of wealth actually feels as real as a mountain.