You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen, — the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives, — I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, “Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves.”

Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me.

And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried, “He is a madman.” I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, “Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks.”

Thus I became a madman.

And I have found both freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.

But let me not be too proud of my safety. Even a Thief in a jail is safe from another thief.

Kahlil Gibran, The Madman

“We are all concerned with the idea of change…”I should be like this” and so on and so on. What happens i that the idea of deliberate change never, never, never functions. As soon as you say, “I want to change” - a counterforce is created that prevents you from change. Changes are taking place by themselves. If you go deeper into what you are, if you accept what is there, then a change automatically occurs by itself. This is the paradox of change.”

Frederick S. Perls

Try as we might, life’s absurdities are not problems to be rid of nor are our contradictions meant to be resolved. Life has a way of keeping things simple. We can either learn to work with - honor - our unique reality or we can keep trying to change it because we cannot accept who we are and where we are.

Many of us live in a world of appearances, amputating ourselves here and there to fit into our various masks. Masks can be most helpful in navigating the world, as long as we remember it is not the mask that makes us lovable, otherwise they become our prison. We spend a lot of energy on these appearances, or who-we-wish-to-be, a perpetual self-improvement project while not nearly enough energy is invested into getting to know who we really are, just as we are.

“All childhood influences shape the soft clay; everything shapes it, everything has significance, whatever exists and whatever is dreamed, whatever is known and whatever is sensed - it all imposes its light but surely drawn network of lines, which must be reshaped and deepened, and then must be smoothed away and erased.”

Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne

In anthropology there are what is known as rites de passage - initiation rites - which underscores the belief that individuals do not automatically develop into responsible, mature, socially minded adults on their own but require guidance from spirit, solitude, and community to ritualistically move from one life transition to another.

The first stage asks one to separate from the usual circumstances, which is essentially one’s social conditioning - all the roles and instructions we’ve been fed from parents, teachers, culture, etc.

Distanced from these social conditions one is primed for the second stage, characterized by liminality, the in-between space after one way of existing begins to shed but before a new way of existence has yet formed. This is the blind, molting snake. Without the relied-upon scripts and dictates of who we ought to be, we are free and naturally this is horrific. We are lost. And lost is the portal through which we may be found. This is the most sacred and most difficult of the stages.

In the third stage of the initiation one re-enters into community, taking a seat at the table as a more mature, authentic being.

In our culture today these rituals are almost non-existent. When relationships, roles, innocence, youth, status, and versions of ourselves all reach its inevitable end in one form or another, it’s likely we will not know how to cope with the loss of these identities that have meant so much to us. Who can we turn to for guidance who doesn’t simply push their own agendas (perhaps that we remain unchanged)? How do we grieve? From which well do we collect the waters of new possibilities?

“…it had never occurred to him that what was great was not always cast in a form that was beautiful.”

Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne

Deep inner work is often liberating and destabilizing. Perhaps these forces are inextricably linked like night and day. No mud, no lotus.

There is deep purpose and meaning in forging ahead even if the rewards aren’t yet visible or known, even when it doesn’t seem like anyone else out there understands, and even when - to your own bewilderment - you keep making the same choices over and over again.