1/2 + 1/2 = Whole

In his book The Genius Myth, author Michael Meade tells an old tale from Borneo.

 

There was once a boy born with just one half of a body. Painfully aware of his deformity as he grew up, he felt alone and rejected by the people in his village. He decided he had no other choice than to leave his home and when he got to the edge of the village and took his first step out into the larger world, there was no one to see him off or wish him well or say a prayer or sing a song. 

 

He wandered until he came to a river and there on the other side, he saw another half-boy. He had only the left side of his body, that boy had the right. You might imagine they simply joined together to make themselves whole, but instead they began to argue and fight about which was the better half, which was the true half and in so doing fell into the river. Still thrashing about together, the river began to heat up and boil and throw up huge waves until it finally settled. Out of its waters came a whole boy with two arms, two legs, two eyes. 

 

This new boy was deeply confused and staggering about, not knowing how to coordinate its two halves. He met an elder who told him that he in fact was right back in the village where he started, a place where no one had sung or danced or celebrated together since he left. So the old man taught the young boy how to move his arms and legs together into a dance and they both came dancing into the village, where all—young and old alike—began dancing and singing and drumming together. We hope that they are dancing still. 

 

If that’s not a story for our times, I don’t know what is. Every day it feels like we’re thrashing around in the raging waters of the news, beaten down by the waves and boiling over with outrage. The left and the right polarized and split apart and incapable of knowing how to dance together. And because of that, the whole village suffers and the world is at the mercy of half-people. Though he wrote his book in 2016, Meade illuminates with his prophet’s eye exactly what is happening here and now. He says:

 

The half-village is the place where people see with the single eye of self-interest and act with the habits of self-involvement. The half-village denies the presence of universal pain and suffering in order to get on with the basic activities of life. Typically, the half-village will ignore the wounds of life until they become insufferable. Beyond that, the half-village will often reward and even sanctify the kind of self-involvement that drives the frequent misuse of power and the extremes of greed. (boldface mine)

 

In the half-village, people reduce everything to polarities—oppositions in which everyone is expected to pick a side. All that can be seen are the opposing halves of life: left or right, right or wrong up or down, good or bad, white or black, male or female, old or young. The very idea of wholeness presents a problem, as most people cannot even acknowledge the common state of divisiveness and opposition. In the modern world, the need for experiences of feeling whole grows greater and greater, while the problem of wholeness grows larger as fewer people recognize the need for healing and the longing to become whole becomes lost in the distractions and delusions of mainstream activities. 

 

Are you with me here? Can you feel how so much of how we react to the challenge of turbulent times is a superficial putting band-aids on cancer rather than the deep-tissue healing our times demand? That how we raise our children— in our homes, our communities, our collective media and our schools is not simply about making their life a bit more pleasant and fun, but is a vote for a future where kids grown to adults with the tools and intentions of growing fully into their own genius will stop the harm and hurt that the half-people in power are causing?

 

As Meade suggests, if each would follow their own thread of life and learn how and where to weave it to the living community of souls, then the world could become again what it has always been and is meant to be: a place of awe, beauty and wonder,  a living ground of renewal and revelation…The true wonder of creation is that is continues to create and that each of us has been invited to participate. The way to participate most fully is to find the unique thread of our genius and gift it back to the waiting world. 

 

Neither inward personal growth or outward political action is enough— both are needed. What is unresolved inside of us in our personal life is necessarily unresolved outside of us in our collective life. What changes in the political realm can’t take root if nothing changes inside of us. In that way, this is a story for all times that dates back to the ancient Greeks, yet is still little known or considered in our modern times. 

 

As noted in James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code and Michael Meade’s The Genius Myth, we are all born with an accompanying genius, an inborn particular pattern that we spend our life trying to recognize and claim, another half that waits to complete us. It calls to us in countless ways and we can only become whole if we tune our ear to the call, agree to respond to the call and follow it regardless of wherever it might lead. That will take some courage, determination and grit, for it will not be calling us to the shopping mall, the video game, the obedient worker doing whatever the boss tells us. If we refuse the call, we live as half-people and never learn how to dance into who we are meant to be. 

 

In short, if enough of us refuse to allow half-people to run the show in both the outer world and our inner world, the possibility of real change may come. Amongst everything else, let us put our own quest for wholeness on the list. 

 

(NOTE TO READER: Occasionally these posts are the same or similar to what I put on Facebook and this time, it’s what I just recorded for my Podcast. I’m hearing the first reports of people silenced for exercising Free Speech, so while I can, want to exhaust every medium available to keep the free exchange of ideas a priority in our crumbling democracy.)