April-June, 2009
In his ground-breaking book on depression The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon used the analogy of the kudzu vine wrapping itself around an oak to choke out its life as a way of describing the debilitating life-draining ability of depression.
With minimal cold weather, kudzu has become a force here in the South, blending beautifully as a blanket of green on top of the landscape it wants to kill. And so, being blessed the other weekend morning with a delicious cold front, my fiancé and I took to our Florida backyard with pruning shears and lopers, wearing jackets and some lip-balm to enjoy the first cold afternoon of the season.
She went to work on the hedges by the house, and I set off in search of the kudzu.
In ACIM, one of the shiny facets of the diamond of the Holy Spirit’s thought system that it presents to us is the process of the removal of the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence. I must look at these blocks in order to ask the Holy Spirit’s help in removing them. I can’t remove them on my own. But I must look and must ask to have them exposed to the light, so the Holy Spirit can shine them away.
Jesus tells us in the section “The Two Pictures,” “As each senseless stone that seems to shine from the frame in darkness is exposed to light, it becomes dull and lifeless, and ceases to distract you from the picture.” (T-17.IV.13:5)
There I was, on my knees in the backyard, looking clearly at the two plants — the landscape hedges planted along the fence and the kudzu, the latter replete with camouflaging flowers and fruit-type pods along its thin, malevolent vines, twisting around branches of the hedges, hurrying at its slow pace to choke them off.
Rather tall plants were posing in the hedgerow as if they, too, belonged, and I followed them down to find trunks in the soil right next to the hedges’ trunks. I got my spade.
Lesson 153 tells us that “you will never cease to think of Him,” (W-pI.155) and I realized, as I crossed my lawn comparing these soon-to-be-purged ‘impostors’ with the ego part of my mind, that I had begun thinking regularly in Course terms.
Watching movies with Course eyes and hearing songs with Course ears has morphed into Course gardening. I coined a parallel in a group years ago about the ego pulling off the greatest ‘identity theft’ of all.
I began clearing the Floridian soil from around the root system that looked so much like that of the wanted hedge, separating ego from spirit, snipping the roots as far away as I could, plunging the spade through the thickest parts, to finally raise the egoic trunk in triumph. The second one came out a bit easier. My fiancé laughed as I danced around like an ape in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the bones of the ego held high.
The introduction to Jesus’ Workbook promises “If true perception has been achieved in connection with any person, situation or event, total transfer to everyone and everything is certain.” (W-in.5:2) The promises of the Course. What a soothing phrase.
I understand how the Holy Spirit can use everything here to help me remove the blocks. The Holy Spirit will not always use spades and pruning shears to help me transfer His training, but Christ’s vision allows me to see the impostor trunks, the kudzu, the ego thoughts, and see them all without fear, for only then will I see that they are nothing. Nothing.
“Vision is the means by which the Holy Spirit translates your nightmares into happy dreams; your wild hallucinations that show you all the fearful outcomes of imagined sin into the calm and reassuring sights with which He would replace them.” (T-20.VIII.10:4)
William Boden holds a BA from Eckerd College and is a student/teacher of ACIM on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
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