Crashingly Beautiful

Photograph: The “Endurance,” Midwinter, 1915/1922: Silver gelatin photograph: Shackleton’s Antarctic Expedition 1914-1917; “The Photographs of Frank Hurley,” 2001, p133: “‘Ice breakers, pressure centre, 1st August 1915’, wrote Hurley in his Green Album. Often used to illustrate various expedition accounts, this photo is usually titled “Almost Overwhelmed.” Provenance: From an album of Antarctic photographs presented by Hurley to Archdeacon John Bidwell in 1922. Josef Lebovic Gallery.

“…I spoke about the ordeal of the British polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, which is described by Shackleton in the rich new “Suffering” issue of Parabola (which you should definitely check out!).

Shackleton’s ship Endurance was crushed in the ice in Antarctica in 1915.   He and his men weathered an Antartic winter on the ship until it broke apart; then they lived on the ice; then they moved to isolated Elephant Island.  After a year and facing another winter, Shackleton decided to place himself and five others in a small open boat for a perilous journey throught hurricane-swept waters to the whaling stations on South Georgia Island, nearly eight hundred miles distant.  When they did hit land, which was a miracle in itself since they were navigating by stars and intuition, they hit the opposite end of the island.  Near death, Shackleton and three others had to march for thirty-six hours over unnamed mountains, through freezing waterfalls.  But they all made it, and all of Shackleton’s men were saved!  

Why tell this story in a meditation group, much less include it in the “Suffering” issue of Parabola?  It illustrates that there is something besides desire, aversion, or spacing out and being oblivious.  Sometimes when conditions allow, we can in Shackleton’s words “pierce the verneer of outside things.”  Shackleton reported sensing another presence walking with them, and the other men later reported to the boss that they had sensed the same.  Sometimes, in great stillness, we can sense this invisible accompanying presence, this greater awareness.  At such moments,  there can be a new possibility for us–a new spaciousness blooms inside us.  We aren’t just pulled along by a desire for what is pleasant and pleasing to the ego or an aversion to pain and what is unpleasant.  I’ve heard this third  possibility called the ability to serve.  It is characterized by clarity and it can descend on us like a kind of grace and allow us to fulfill even arduous obligations in a freely chosen kind of way.   I think when we sit down on our meditation cushions, when we pray, when we contemplate in nature, when we lovingly fulfill our obligations even when we don’t want to–all those times when we notice what is and how we are-yet go on–we are practicing allowing this kind of spaciousness to appear.”

—an excerpt from Tracy Cochran’s latest offering: “The Stillness of Snow” @Parabola Editors blog.

From parabola-magazine.