Mysterium and Meaning-Makers

A few summers ago, my roommate Nikki and I decided that all of the world was a mystery.  Already unconsciously aware of this fact, we brought forth this mantra to frame each and every experience we encountered.  We would add it to the end of statements, such as, "Nikki, the newspaper came today... what a mystery!!  How did it even arrive here?  Who brought it and what is he trying to tell us??!"  One morning we decided to leave him (or her!) a muffin with a note, but I don't think that they took it; THE MYSTERY CONTINUED....

The funny thing is though, sticking this lens on the front of everyday experience, like a newborn encountering the world for the first time, truly enhanced it for me; it not only made us laugh, but reminded us to wonder... about everything!  The world was made new; we were reminded of the magic of it.  We created the space to ask questions that may not have answers and delight in the unknown rather than fear it.

I've been wondering about the connection of meaning making and adventure therapy, after reading an article that claimed that adventure therapy gets at the spiritual aspect of ourselves.  Willie Unsoeld, a famous adventurer who was trying to figure out the components of Outward Bound, talks about the "cosmic perspective" his essay entitled Spiritual Values in Wilderness and the numinous:

He [Rudolph Otto, author of "The Idea of the Holy"] coined a new word - the idea of the "numinous".  It's a dimension of human experience.  The numinous dimension of reality consists of mysterium, tremendum, et fascinosan.  Mysterium is the sense of mystery.  There has never been a sacred anything that lacked mystery.  The mysteriousness of it is the sense of something more, of a hiddenness beyond which you can't go... When you step into the wilderness, and here is where I make the transition, there is a mystery in nature which I thin is one of its great attractions for us.  There's a hiddennes of organic growth, of how a seed decides to be an oak tree.  No matter how much reference we have to the genetic coding of RNA, DNA, somehow it doesn't  come out totally explained. 

Not only does nature embody mysterium, but each of us is made from it.  Though we can learn about our own biology, isn't it baffling how everything works and how the outside world can be so influential to our inner selves?  Even more, when chaotic mysterium suddenly comes a little closer to ourselves, we may want meaning from these experiences and help our spirits to cope with chaos by dwelling within the comforts of music, the arts, personal connection or even endorphins of physical activity.  These delights create energy in us; we become delighted in their hidden sparks of the numinous.  In Circle of Quiet, Madeleine L'Engle writes about her response to chaos:

After a day in the emergency room of a city hospital, a day in which I was surrounded by accidents, dying children, irritable patients, many of whom spoke no English and could not follow directions, incredible patience on the part of the understaffed doctors and nurses, I felt somewhat the same sense of irrationality in the world around me (all these people were there by accident) as did the man who was almost killed by the falling beam.  Whenever this occurs I turn to the piano, to my typewriter, to a book.  We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are, and what our relationship is to life and death, what is essential, and what, despite the arbitrariness of falling beams, will not burn.  - Madeleine L'Engle, Circle of Quiet

In this way, our tiny bodies and spirits exist within and beyond this expansive wilderness that extends way way out there.  Yet, if we keep our heads connected to our bodies and keeping breathing into our spirits to explore and connect with the tremendum (raw power) of the environment and connections that surrounds us, we can engage with the mysterium (awe-some-ness).  We can feel loved, inspired, delighted and even excited or simply at peace.  Adventure experiences can set the stage for meaning making:  space is created for thinking, connecting, and exploring.  In the article Adventure Therapy in Occupational Therapy: Can We Call it Spiritual Occupation? the author connects humans with meaning:

Human beings are meaning makers, in that they make and express meaning through their performance as well as through their cognitive activities.  Moreover, making meaning through performance is constitutive of who we are.  As human beings we attribute meaning to our own and others activities, and it is through our actions that we express what we mean and who we are.  Making meaning in everyday activities is considered the essence of spirituality. 

The world is so mysterious, in great and terrible ways.  We can make it meaningful of meaningless in any way that we'd like to and in this way, help our spirits grow or allow them to become disabled.  May we meet the numinous and walk amongst its mysterium, tremendum, et fascinosan.... you know what I mean?

There are so many mysteries yet to be solved!!!

The Cost of a Book

Some photos from La Vida last Fall.

After reviewing some of the syllabus, my professor walked towards the cardboard boxes in the center of the room.  They were taped up with addresses and stamps, wrapped with white plastic tape all around them.  He asked if anyone had a knife.  Surrounded by outdoor education students, it was surely inevitable.

"If I cut myself, I suspect we have some people with the medical qualifications to help me." he said, as he began to use someone's pocketknife.

"You're going to give us the books?" asked a student.
"I'm not going to give them to you, you're going to take them." said the professor.

Upon breaking the seals, he returned to his seat.  "The retail value of these is $40."  he said, pausing, as he often does between sentences.  He sits with his arms calmly placed on each chair rest of the chairs next to him, in this circle we're all apart of.  His burnt orange t-shirt has a logo on the back for a mountain club and he's wearing Chacos around his feet.  Without any pretenses or judgments, he speaks intentionally.  Every word seems to be weighted with value and engages each person.  "But the Publisher sells them to me for $20."

"I know that a lot of people have invested in me."  He goes on to tell the story of why he ended up in this field.  We begin to see that 37 years of research and experience have gone into this book.

The room is quiet as we contemplate the boxes of books.  "Now, if you take a book, you get to choose the remuneration."  He then gets out of his chair and walks towards the books.  "You could do this."  He picks one up and walks back to his desk.  "You could pick up a book and sit down."  Then, he returns to the books and hesitates before asking, "Or - does anyone have, a lot of money on them?"  To this, everyone smiles, perhaps thinking it's an ironic question for a group of college students, but a girl happens to have a $50 bill on her.  "Now see, she could take that, get a book, and put the money in, and return to her seat."  His voice doesn't let on that there is a right answer, as most facilitator voices often sound like.

By the end of class, everyone has a book.  Some just took one, another put in a note and a $20 bill, another explained he would give according to the value he thought it should have (after reading it), and I?  Well, he already gave me a copy last year when I sat in on his class.  I told him this, to which he asked, "Why do you think I gave you one?"  "Because I think you believe in it and you want to share your knowledge.  But I was thinking I'd pay you back."

He allowed us to make our own meaning, which people do all the time in the realms of this field.  People quickly create metaphors for their own life and choose the value of their experience.  An element on the ropes course or challenge in nature (such as hiking up a steep mountain) turn into analogies for how they deal with struggle, how they perceive a problem, or how they communicate effectively with the people around them.  Yesterday, my group drew analogies from the Spider's Web to learning a difficult (German) piece of music (they were a choral group).  Here, our professor allowed us to put our own monetary value on something, or not - and here I am building a metaphor from that situation to my experience within experiential education.  The challenge is to bring the learning from those novel experiences to how we handle our daily routines and how we integrate them with our "normal" selves.

Welcome to Adventure Therapy.  Let the games begin.