grrrrrr. . .

In Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None," there is a chapter entitled “On the Three Metamorphoses.” In it, Nietzsche explains that there are three stages of metamorphoses that the human spirit can undergo in his or her lifetime: the camel, the lion, and the child. My travel-friend, J.J., told me about this, and I have been thinking about it a lot as of late. I don't pretend to be a philosophy professor, but this is my understanding of the idea.

The camel is the stage that we are all born into. This stage is about assimilating into society; storing cultural norms and accepting readily-available ideologies in order to blend in and make them match with your own personal experience. Think of all you absorb from society as being stored on your back and carried around. Most people never move from the camel stage.

The next phase is the lion. This is when your spirit rebels against the camel phase and calls everything it had been "storing" into question. One good thing about this phase is that it is often where creative people dwell; those who are willing to push boundaries and create beauty or life or inspiration where there was none before, however unconventional their methods may be. One downfall of this phase is its prolific, often unfocused, anger. Someone in the lion phase may be in the exciting process of individualization and self-discovery, but often only through thrashing and internal violence.

The third and final stage is that of the child. This is an overturning of both camel and lion phases, and a return to simplicity in childhood. Someone in this phase is neither accepting all that society would teach them nor beating up against it. Their spirits are not ruled by the future or the past, but simply live in the present - observing, living, breathing, smiling. In Eastern philosophy they would refer to this as enlightenment. In Christianity, I assume it was what Jesus referred to when he said that you must come to him as a child.

I'm sure it hasn't taken you blog-readers long to identify me as the lion, vis a vis my most recent blog posts about anger and my Christian past. Yes, there is quite a bit of lion in me. I'm certainly not a camel, that's for sure. I would like to think that I tasted the child phase ever so briefly when I was in Nice, on the French Riviera, or in Lauterbrunnen, in the Swiss Alps. Something about those places and my experiences there touched my spirit in a way that I have never experienced. I really felt as though I wasn't living life, but it was living me. I felt at one with everything in the universe, as though we all shared the same fabric, the same consciousness. I felt no anger or fear, no bitterness about the past or anxiety about the future. I just was.

But since returning from Europe, I could hear the lion's roar deep down inside of me, growing louder ever so slowly. The first week or so I think I was able to be a child much more easily than I expected. I felt that I was taking all that peace and enlightenment with me, and spreading it around this ugly suburban wasteland like wildflower seeds. But one by one, old pieces of my life came crashing back into my daily space. Traffic. Work. Strained relationships. Religious judgements. Deep-seated family issues. Fears about life-long lonliness. Health problems. With each one, I could feel a little, clawed paw reach out and swing from inside. The lion was rising once again. I was slipping.

I tried desperately to cling to that open-faced child that I knew was still around somewhere, but she was being mauled by a hungry lion. I'm back, and I'm angry, and I'm swinging wildly around at whomever I can.

But here's the interesting thing about lions and their anger - it's almost always motivated by fear. A lion doesn't get angry just for fun or because it's a stupid animal just looking for a fight. It gets angry when it senses that its pride may be in danger (as in the lions it protects, not its ego). For example, if there is an enemy or perceived threat on its land or near other lions it cares about, it will shout out a deafening roar to let everyone know who's in charge. And the worst is a mama lion when she sense her babies may be in danger. You could argue that lions are unnecessarily violent when killing prey, but I would disagree. They are simply looking for food, and often to share. They are not a species that tortures their prey first. They strategize, act, and bring the carcass home to the kids. In fact, I might argue that more timid animals do their prey more harm - like chickens who might just slowly peck something to death or spiders who let their dinner die slowly in the middle of their manipulative web.

Ok, where is all this nature-show stuff going? I guess I'm trying to say that although I may have slipped back into the lion phase, I've learned something new about my anger. It's motivated by fear. I seem to lash out more when I feel unsafe. It's a lot easier than vulnerability.

What's that? You don't like this blog post? Grrrr. . . . .