July/August 2000
Articles on the theme "Exploring and Adventure"
The Way of the Adventurer
by Bob Gonzalez
The inspiration of the classical Greek
adventurer, Odysseus -- whom the Romans called Ulysses -- as portrayed in
Tennyson's poem "Ulysses."
Exploring with Wonder
by Kathy Houston
The adventure of life. Exploring it
with the wonder and imaginings of a child.
A Spiritual Adventure
by Rev. Pat Cross
Making a new start at any age -- an
exploration and adventure in consciousness... the ultimate eternal adventure.
Exploring the Adventure Within
by Ron Graham
The adventure of becoming One with
the universal mind of God.
Life's Adventures
by Linda Bothwell
From birth to falling in love, to Self-realization
Exploring Body/Mind Healing
by Ernesto J. Fernandez
An approach to healing that helps define
the best 'road map' and the best forms of treatment.
Exploring God as Process
by Rev. Pat Palmer
God as not only the source of everything
that is but also as the unfolding of every event that occurs.
Why Explore?
by Patrick Plaskett
How exploration helps us see the world
and ourselves differently -- and get more out of life.
Exploring the Self
by Edwina H. Holloway
The greatest adventure of all, the
excavation of our true Self.
A Learning Adventure
by Rev. Cydné Battreall
The story of a mother and daughter
in the adventure of a lifetime.
The Lure of Adventure
by Charles Larsen
What exploration and adventure consist
of. Achieving a state of mind to experience them.
Other Feature Articles
Natural Health Q & A
by Kim Gillespie
Concerning cocaine and drug abuse.
2000 & Beyond!
by David Findlay
What is... Sustainable/Organic Agriculture?
by Robert Roman
What sustainable/organic agriculture
is and why it is superior to commercial agriculture.
Minerals from Mother Earth
by Judy Power
Features stones for July and August:
jade and charoite.
The Way of the Adventurer
Bob Gonzalez
My old and battered paperback copy of Oscar Williams poetry anthology, "Immortal Poems of the English Language," is broken in two at the page where begins Alfred Lord Tennyson's dramatic poem in iambic pentameter, "Ulysses." In it, Tennyson fashions a monologue where the aging hero prepares to leave his Ithaca home to wander the world until he dies. He begins with these words:
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags
Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard and sleep and feed and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees. All times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; ...
Life is growth and, particularly for humans, life is growth of consciousness. At least that is what saves us from endless cycles of mere hoarding, sleeping and feeding. For consciousness to grow, wisdom must be cultivated. To cultivate wisdom, we must have the opportunity to gather knowledge from direct experience and thoroughly assimilate it through reflection.
Homer's timeless hero, Odysseus, whom the Romans called Ulysses, is the archetypal and quintessential adventurer. It is he who seeks and savors every one of life's experiences, who drinks "life to the lees."
When the Trojan war is won, it is Odysseus' ill fortune to so offend the sea-god Poseidon that he and his men are blown all along the Mediterranean coast for ten years before Odysseus alone is allowed to return home to Ithaca. During this time, Odysseus experiences his legendary encounters with the Cyclops, Polyphemus, with the sorceress Circe, with the tempting Sirens, and with the twin monsters Scylla and Charybdis. At one point, Odysseus even visits Hades, the Land of the Dead.
When Odysseus' ship is set to pass by the waters where sing the fatally tempting Sirens - whose song is so beautiful that it drives hearers to them, and thereby to their death - Odysseus stops up his mariners' ears with beeswax. But his own ears he leaves unstopped, for he himself must experience the Sirens' song. He has his men secure him to the mast and instructs them not to untie him no matter how loudly and pitifully he begs to be released.
At another point in his journey, the gods offer immortality to Odysseus but he ultimately refuses them because immortality would deny him the experience of death. It is vital to Odysseus that he experience all of life, even the putting aside of the body. In Tennyson's words, Ulysses speaks:
I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known
For Odysseus, as for any adventurer, Life is the continuous search for new experiences. It is in the experience of the new, and its relation to all that we have been before it, that we learn to see and be a greater reality than we could ever know without the experience. In the promise of the new is the hope for the shedding of our limited concept of self and embracing a new world of expanded potential and fullness.
Life is perpetual motion and, as we move, we grow. With each experience and with the reflection on it that allows us to assimilate it into our being, we extend ourselves, alter ourselves and the environment into which we enter. In Tennyson's words:
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
The exploratory way of the adventurer is to search for the experiences in life that will contribute to the growth of consciousness. The inward desire fuels the outward journey and, in turn, the outward journey illuminates inward realization. The cycle is endless, for the possibilities of growth are endless. Tennyson's Ulysses entreats us:
Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
The Mystery of Life is great. It always surrounds and extends well beyond us, and most likely will ultimately elude our complete understanding. Yet, as we continue to penetrate it, we leave behind us the skins of our former selves and embrace an increasingly greater Self of infinite potential. As we choose to do so, we join in spirit with Ulysses and become
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Bob Gonzalez is a freelance writer/photographer who with his family manages Ansley's Natural Marketplaces in Tampa FL. (813) 239-2700.
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