a ladder to the stars

a manifesto

art by Sara Stibitz based on Jacob’s Ladder quilt pattern

We Are Meaning Making Machines

Against the rest of my childhood memories, the memory of my parents breaking the news of their divorce stands out in stark relief.

It had been a good night. We went to Pizza Hut to get my free, personal pan pizza (Book It!). They talked openly and warmly with each other, they asked about school, and I read my favorite book. When we got home, they stood at the counter sorting mail together, laughing. It wasn’t until years later that I understood why that moment stuck out to me so clearly—it was because it was such a rare sight.

Later we sat in the living room watching TV. My dad suddenly turned the show off and my mom reached for me and pulled me close to her on the couch, as if on some hidden cue. Dad turned in his recliner, and said to me, “We have something we need to tell you and we want you to know that we love you and it is not your fault,” Or something to that effect. The word “DIVORCE” flashed like flashbulbs in my mind, even though I never consciously thought of that word before or what it meant. The memory is vague from that point on, but I cried a lot, and my mother held me and cried, too. The news was devastating.

Later, my dad got me orange juice and my mom and I sat in the living room and talked about what was going to happen next; my dad retreated from the emotional onslaught. I went through a litany of things: where is the couch going? Where is the TV going? Where is the table going? Where is our dog Charlie going?

OH… where am I going?

My mother answered that she could not part from me, and so I would go with her, and so would Charlie. I had a vague awareness of the implication that my father could part with me, or perhaps felt less pain at the thought of doing so.

There was no sign of it coming. As adults, we know what emotional coldness or frigidness or resistance we might have endured for years before the end of a relationship, but a kid has no construct for what that means. I never saw them fight in front of me. I could not remember one disagreement. The only vague memory I have is the numbing silence that lay like a blanket over the house. My sun and moon were shifting apart—had already shifted apart—and I hadn’t known it was happening.

At some point during their divorce, I became disengaged from the Catholicism in which I was raised. I was interested in spiritual practices that centered on feminine figures, particularly Wicca. While the god still plays a part, the focus is often on the goddess, represented by the moon. I learned about the moon cycles and how they affect the earth, and looking up at the night sky to see which phase she was in became a habit for me. I loved how she glowed, and I felt as if I could feel life beaming down on me.

In the meantime, the divorce proceeded. While I don’t remember whether my mother and I were close before the divorce, she became my world afterward. She was my parent, while my father was present but less parental. She could admonish me about grades or homework, where I took my dad far less seriously. She was the one I turned to about problems or hurt feelings, while my dad heard the watered-down version after I was over it.

When I left home and started life on my own, any sense of faith became dormant, and for a long time, I stopped believing in god. It wasn’t until I was in my early 30s after I had ended a nine-year relationship and my mother had died that I really started to explore faith again. Unsurprisingly, with so much life change it was a pivotal moment of adjustment in my life, and there were all kinds of doors opening within me.

One fall I was at a Landmark forum, that cultish organization that people either love or loathe. “We are meaning making machines,” we were told again and again. I thought about what I made some of the events of my life mean, trying to pull them apart and discard the meaning.

It took a lot of mindpower to realize that I made the divorce mean that my dad didn’t love me. It was obvious in hindsight but hard to admit.

But as I rode home in my friend’s car that night, something else nagged at me. It was November, and I was staring at the miles of plowed and barren corn fields waiting for snow. The full moon shone silver and I could not stop staring. I sensed there was something else my ten-year-old brain had constructed in the aftermath of all of it, and I wasn’t seeing it… until the hypnotizing lull of the road and the way the moonlight hit my eyes suddenly brought it out of me.

In the cosmology of my life, my parents had been my sun and moon, and when they moved apart, I worshipped her and turned away from him.

I had made my world all about the goddess—the feminine—in the years afterward.

I had turned away from god, the masculine version of god, because I was sure she loved me and I was not sure that he did.

I had unconsciously made my parents’ divorce mean that god didn’t love me.

I had no idea that I had made the divorce mean that my father didn’t love me anymore. I had no idea that I had overlaid god all over those events, that by extension if the chief male figure in my life didn’t love me, then neither did god.

But I had, and that subtle, unconscious belief had dictated so much about how I lived my life—it dictated the way I experienced spirituality, the way I behaved in relationships with both men and women, and the way that I thought life worked.

The ability to create meaning is a matter of survival, and yet in our culture, we are encouraged to pursue a purely mind-based, rational view of the world, to make no meaning of the events that we live through. It’s as if being a good human means being unemotional, unattached, unexamined, unfeeling. Because of this insistence on rationality, we’re left without the tools to build helpful, soul-fulfilling meaning for ourselves. And so our brains do it without our conscious guidance—which usually doesn’t benefit us.

Sometimes we create meaning where we would be better served by choosing not to create any meaning at all. Sometimes we create meanings that ultimately tear us down. Sometimes we create meanings that sow division between us and other people.

We are meaning-making machines—and we don't even know it. We need meaning to survive, but it is not just any meaning we need, and it is not the unconscious garbage that we create.

We need to know how to create it, when and how to change it at will, and—maybe most importantly—when not to create it.

Our ability to create meaning, over and over again, is our ability to transcend the events of our lives, to create a ladder to the stars.

We make meaning through stories and symbols.

In 1453, the Ottoman army that attacked and besieged Constantinople was led by a 21-year-old headstrong young ruler, Sultan Memed II. No one believed this guy with quite a lot of cajones was going to take down a city that withstood countless attacks over a thousand years. And yet, it was a time of change. Mehmed, later nicknamed “the Conquerer,” brought cannons to the party for the first time ever. He brought ships overland in a surprise maneuver that outwitted the other side. He had all the new tricks.

Mehmed was intrepid and creative, but after 50 days, supplies were running out and people began to doubt the possibility of defeating the city. Then, on May 22, 1453, seven days before the city fell, a lunar eclipse gave the Christians inside the city walls a sense of doom. Survivor Nicolo Barbaro, a Venetian defender, gave an account that described the way the moon rose that night.

On the same day of May 22, at the first hour of night appeared a miraculous sign in the sky to tell the respectable emperor of Constantinople that his respected empire was approaching its end, which, in effect, came to pass…that evening, at the first hour of the night, the moon rose.

As it was full, it should have been a complete circle. But this moon rose as if it were a three-day moon: little of it appeared, even though the atmosphere was calm, like a clear, polished crystal. The moon persisted in this form for about four hours and then, little by little, it completed its full circle. By the sixth hour of the night it had formed its complete circle…

When we Christians and the heathen saw this miraculous sign, the emperor of Constantinople conceived great fear (as did his entire retinue of barons), because the Greeks knew of a prophecy which declared that Constantinople would always endure provided that the moon, in its full circle, did not give a sign in the sky; this was the reason for the terror that came upon the Greeks.

But the Turks celebrated a great festival throughout their camp, out of joy for this sign, because it predicted victory for them, which turned out to be true.” (quoted in Philippines and Hanak, pg. 226-27)

There were more signs and portents, but the interesting thing is that because of the prophecy, the Christians saw the lunar eclipse as a sign of their destruction. The prophecy gave it a dire meaning.

On the other side, the lunar eclipse gave the Ottomans hope—they made the exact same event mean that they were sure to win.

Sure enough, just seven days later, the city fell. It took 53 days to bring about the end of the Byzantine era and the Middle ages, and the beginning of the end of Roman rule as we knew it.

People on all sides of the battle took the same event—the lunar eclipse—and created two different meanings, which deeply affected the outcome. Those who believed the sign meant their time had come to rise, rose. Those who believed the sign meant their time had come to fall, fell.

Whether in ancient battles or modern lives, the meanings we create determine whether we rise or fall. But what if we recognized that this meaning-making ability itself is a choice?

The Power of Choice: Timshel and the Creation of Meaning

In his book, East of Eden, John Steinbeck comes to the penultimate point of the book when he writes the scene between characters Lee and Adam. Lee tells Adam that he studied the sixteen verses of the fourth chapter of the book of Genesis, and a phrase in the King James version caught his eye, where Jehovah says to Cain: "And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him." Thou shalt was like a promise that Cain would conquer sin.

But in the American Standard Bible, the line is this: "Do thou rule over him," which Lee reads as a command.

Lee was so intrigued by the differences that he studied Hebrew, and looked for "experts in meaning who could advise" him. After two years of intense study, Lee and the scholars finally felt ready to approach the question. What did the author mean when they wrote the original passage? Which one was it, a promise, or a command?

It was neither. The gold was in the original intention of the writer. Steinbeck says through the character of Lee:

The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in 'Thou shalt,' meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—'Thou mayest'— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if 'Thou mayest'—it is also true that 'Thou mayest not.'

Any writing which has influenced the thinking and the lives of innumerable people is important. Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, 'Do thou,' and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in 'Thou shalt.' Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But 'Thou mayest'! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win… It is easy out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself into the lap of deity, saying, 'I couldn't help it; the way was set.' But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man.

[T]hese sixteen verses are a history of humankind in any age or culture or race. [The scholars] do not believe a man writes fifteen and three-quarter verses of truth and tells a lie with one verb. Confucius tells men how they should live to have good and successful lives. But this—this is a ladder to climb to the stars." Lee's eyes shone. "You can never lose that. It cuts the feet from under weakness and cowardliness and laziness."

… I feel that a man is a very important thing—maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed—because 'Thou mayest.'

Our lives are a co-creation. It is our free will combined with the guidance of whatever higher power we believe in that guides us through life. We cannot "throw ourselves into the lap of deity," religious or corporate or political or capitalist, and expect our meaning and purpose to come from them. As my dear friend Faith says, we throw ourselves into the lap of whatever deity we fancy because it's easier than feeling desperation, pride, hope, or fear. We have to be willing to brave the difficult emotions and co-create the meaning of our lives with whatever we call divine.

The Necessity of Meaning

We cannot function without meaning. As Viktor Frankl wrote so poignantly in Man's Search for Meaning, those prisoners in the concentration camps of World War II who had something to live for, some meaning in their lives, survived. As soon as they gave up that meaning, they passed. Meaning was literally the difference between life and death.

Meaning gave inmates hope, courage, and a will to live. "Once lost, the will to live seldom returned," he wrote. Frankl wrote:

Whenever there was an opportunity for it, one had to give them a why—an aim—for their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence. Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost. The typical reply with which such a man rejected all encouraging arguments was, "I have nothing to expect from life any more." What sort of answer can one give to that?

The Choice to Create Meaning

Frankl's experiences showed him that it was not that life handed everyone a meaning to live by, but that each individual had to find their own meaning. More than that, we have to move away from our demands of life.

What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fiulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus is it impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way... No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny. No situation repeats itself, and each situation calls for a different response.

Frankl believes that meaning isn't inherent, it is something that every one of us must create for ourselves. Frankl is known as an existentialist, a philosophy that can lead us quickly to nihilism.

The danger in accepting that there is no inherent meaning in our life experiences is to draw the conclusion that life itself is meaningless, that events are meaningless. This verges on nihilism, which is a dark kind of pessimism.

In philosophy, nihilism is "extreme skepticism that nothing in the world has real existence." The word literally means "nothingism." Nihilists believe in nothing and maintain that life has no meaning. Jean-Paul Sartre was a nihilist: "Man is a useless passion. It is meaningless that we live and it is meaningless that we die."

Nihilism is appealing to the rationalists and materialists among us. What better satisfaction than to explain away the mysteries of life and of the world with the simple declaration that it is all meaningless? What better way to deal with the anxiety-inducing uncertainty of life than to declare that there is nothing to be uncertain about? What better way to grapple with the big questions that we can never have answers to than to decide there are no answers?

Nihilism is a way out—and one that isn't very effective. Have you ever met a happy, kind nihilist? No? Me either.

The truth is, though, that all of us will touch into nihilism at least once in our lives. There is play, yin and yang, between meaning and meaninglessness. Any kind of deadening, lost-hope feeling is a doorway, a pointer into something that has been lost.

While philosophers and writers like Steinbeck and Frankl illuminate the importance of meaning and choice intellectually, I discovered my own path through meaninglessness and grief not through philosophy alone, but through the tangible act of creation.

Finding My Ladder Through Creation

After my father died, it took a long time to resurrect myself. I didn't realize it at first, but grief drew me into a dance with one of the purely physical, sensual aspects of life: food.

The seed of it was planted the third day my father was in hospice; I'd spent the entire day in the room with him, lights dimmed, the sound of his labored staccato breath setting the pace. He had become less and less responsive over the previous days and it was clear his awareness was slipping away. My sister-in-law offered to pick me up and drive me to get some food and I gladly went, eager for a break from the gray, dim light of the room that penetrated my heart. Whatever I ate that morning had ceased to hold me over and I was hungry but had no appetite.

She took me to this pseudo-healthy fast food place; I had doubts but didn't care. I ordered some vague kind of Asian-style salad and we took it outside to eat. I had no expectations that this would be good.

Natalia told me about her day as I ate. Cars passed by on the freeway next to the strip mall. I put the food in my mouth and take the first bite and the flavor explodes.

The bite of purple cabbage. The zing of ginger that wakes me up. The umami of soy and shiitake. I am absolutely not expecting this. It's so distracting that I lose track of what Nati is saying for a moment. Every sense is shocked wide awake. I take another bite. My body rises to the food. It is practically erotic. All day all around has been death and decay: the smell, the sight, the sound. This food is life and my body wraps itself around it.

I marked the moment by telling her "This is a lot better than I expected," but I couldn't really convey the power of what I was experiencing. Why was it so incredibly good?

About a year later. I am still in the grip of acute grief. The experience seems to drag on, my own personal underworld hell. One afternoon I pulled one of his favorite cookbooks from the shelf and leafed through it, wishing I had paid more attention to the way he cooked, the recipes he used. Just one more heavy regret to carry. I close my eyes, thinking back to his mother—my grandmother Rose—a talented Italian cook. I wonder about her mother, and her mother, and back and back and back. All those lost recipes, all those tastes they made and enjoyed, gone to time. And suddenly I get this message, loud as day: it's not really about finding the recipes they cooked. It doesn't matter if you figure out the exact recipe for your dad's pasta sauce. It matters that you cook your own sauce and you love it. That's the connecting piece, that's the tradition— it's not the order of steps and the exact number and kind of ingredients of a recipe. They loved cooking.

Something in me is loosed from that moment on. My cooking is good, but it becomes inspired. Tastes and textures come together at a new level. My partner loves my cooking, our guests do too. But more importantly, I love my cooking. Every time I take a bite of something new I have created, it is like that moment on the patio of the strip mall restaurant, surprisingly life-giving. I teeter on the edge of obsession. I let myself get lost in an afternoon of making and creating. Each experiment in the kitchen, each delicious taste, seems to lead me out, step by step, from the underworld. At first, it seemed food was the invitation to life.

At some point, I took an interest in baking. I love it, but I also struggle to eat gluten, so I'm stuck with gluten-free bread. I have it in my head that I am going to bake the best loaf of gluten-free bread that I can. But I also know, because I know other bakers, that baking is not improv-friendly. I'm great at improv... not so great at following precise instructions. I always veer toward "off-roading," experimenting. So when I entered the world of bread baking, I knew I was going to get my ass kicked.

And I did. The first time, I accidentally started the wrong recipe, forgetting that I didn't have oat flour. I had to improvise right away. My first loaf turned out okay—dense, thick, but edible.

The second time I baked bread, I had to throw my yeast out twice because I didn't yet know that monkfruit sweetener doesn't work to activate the yeast (only sugar or honey does).

On the third go-round, I accidentally added a full cup of extra water because my liquid measuring cup was deceptive. When the dough rose, it was a mountainous blob of watery dough, and I intuited that this was not going to work. But I had to try anyway, so I skimmed half of it and put the other half into the baking tin, and popped it into the oven. Left with still quite a lot of dough, I wondered what the hell to do with it. Then I thought...what about frying it? So I did. I fried flat discs of dough with a sprinkle of salt and garlic powder on top. The result was so good Ryan and I had a hard time not eating all of it in one sitting. The bread, on the other hand, was so over-proofed that it caved in, and also ruined the pan in the process.

The fourth time I baked, I forgot that I'd thrown away the ruined pan after the previous experience and already had the dough ready to go by the time I discovered this. I had to improvise again and cook it in a Spanish paella dish. Somehow that worked.

But I'll tell you, it was the first time that I stood over the bowl of lukewarm water mixed with yeast and honey, waiting for the yeast to activate, that I realized that it wasn't just the food, the tastes, the smells, the sensory experience that was bringing me back from the dead. It was the act of creating, again and again—and not knowing the outcome. Cooking and baking were forced labs for creation (and failure). Dinner had to be cooked every day—we had to eat. There was no putting it off for another day. It was an excuse to create something from nothing.

As I stared at that moon-like pool of water, unsure whether this would work or not, first one, and then two "bubbles" rose. I watched bent over, face practically in the bowl, the smell of warm yeast and sugar in my nose—and in a flurry of energy and bubbles, the yeast came to life. Supernovas exploded and burst across the surface. New galaxies came into existence. I could feel the spirit of it, sense the aliveness of it—this was life, and it was helping me create something new.

These kitchen experiments weren't just about food. They were acts of creation that slowly pulled me back to life. I began to see that creating something (anything) was my way forward. This realization eventually led me back to Steinbeck and his creative interpretation of a single, powerful word. I found myself wondering if his approach to meaning might hold the key to my own resurrection.

The Creation of Meaning: Returning to Timshel

The first time I read John Steinbeck's East of Eden, I was in my early 20s, a junior in college, steadfastly avoiding serious school work by reading the meatiest classics I could find—Anna Karenina, Les Miserables, and Steinbeck's masterpiece.

The crux of the entire book is contained in the section where Lee lays out his theory about the word timshel. The section is a masterpiece in teaching meaning through fiction. I marveled at the depth and richness of the meaning with which Steinbeck wrote his story. This was my new favorite book. And at least some part of me thought I wanted to write like that someday.

If you haven’t read it, the book is about the tug of war between good and evil and how they play out in human lives. Steinbeck explores whether we're compelled to do bad or good things, or whether we are always destined to carry out the most defining acts of our lives by a will far greater than our own. The true meaning of timshel, as described in the book, is "thou mayest," meaning it is ultimately up to each one of us to decide how we go. We have free will, which is what makes us what we are.

The word timshel has come to hold so much meaning for people around the world. A quick Google search will tell you there are 400,000+ entries talking about it. Mumford and Sons wrote a popular song called Timshel in which they expanded on the theme. People have tattoos of the word on their bodies. I thought about getting it tattooed on my body.

Years later, after having reread it several times, I decided to take a look at the Hebrew meaning of the word timshel and its components. So I did a quick search to see where I could start... and was surprised that one of the first entries I found came from a tattoo artist, advising readers not to get a tattoo of the word timshel—because "it's not a real Hebrew word."

The hell you say, I thought. But then I dug further... and discovered quite a lot of arguments in the background. The word—and its existence—are in hot debate.

This gave me pause. Did Steinbeck actually make this word up? I thought. Did this man just make up a word and say it was from the Hebrew language? And did that word become so important in the public mind that it didn't matter if it was an actual Hebrew word—or did they simply not know?

The reader in me felt bamboozled. The writer in me thought What hubris, what chutzpah! What kind of cosmic joke is this?

The puzzle dug at me, so I got busy trying to get to the bottom of it, to understand what he did. Turns out Steinbeck kept journals for many of the novels he wrote, and those journals are published. I was delighted. The journals are much like mine—he often starts out talking about prosaic things: what he ate that morning, what was going on with his children, what errands he had to do that day, how he felt about writing (the answer: sometimes neurotic and melancholy, just like the rest of us). Then he'd dip into talking about the work of writing he had to do: the plot snags he needed to work out, the character issues, the scenes, and whether they worked. Then he'd return to talking about the mundanity of life in the very next sentence.

There are parts of his journal where he talks to his editor as if writing directly to him. It's like an ongoing conversation; what's unclear is whether or how Pat read any of it, although there is some evidence that Steinbeck did send letters to his editor saying similar things. A few weeks into writing East of Eden, he says the following:

A strange and mystic business, writing...And one thing we have lost—the courage to make new words or combinations [emphasis added]. Somewhere that old bravado has slipped off into a gangrened scholarship. Oh! you can make words if you enclose them in quotation marks. This indicates that it is dialect and cute.

Such a curious thing to say, seemingly out of nowhere. It seemed to me that right from the outset, he was thinking about new words. He continues with the discussion of writing without returning to that particular subject again.

Later in the journal, Steinbeck responds to his editor's letters, so we know they were communicating pretty regularly. In one entry, it becomes clear that they've been communicating about the word, as Steinbeck asked Pat to talk to a well-known Jewish scholar about the varying definitions found across Bibles.

Now in the work today or tomorrow I am going to need that Hebrew word which has been variously translated “do thou,” “thou shalt,” and “thou mayest.” I need the word and I want you to get me a good scholarly discussion of it. I have a charming scene to use it in and I can write it all only leaving out that one word to be filled in later.

It seems there are several possible interpretations for timshel, and he’s trying to understand which one has more weight. We don't really know what exactly Pat said, but I think you can infer from Steinbeck's later entry that there was some ambiguity in what the scholar said:

I was very glad of your last letter. And the translation of the word. Don’t worry about it. I will have to get the best answers. And if there is an argument I am all right. Don’t forget that in the Jewish translation you sent, they did not think “timshel” was a pure future tense. They translated it “thou mayest.” This means that at least there is a difference of opinion and that is enough for me. I will have to have the whole verb before I will finish, from infinitive on through past, subjunctives and compounds and futures. But we will get it. We may have to go outside of rabbinical thought to pure scholarship which may be non-Jewish. What American university has a good Hebrew department? Dr. Ginzberg, dealing in theology, may have a slightly different attitude from that of a pure etymologist. We know that the other translations were warped by what the translators wished to be there. Words are strange elusive things and no man may permanently stick them on pins or mount them in glass cases. The academies have tried that and have only succeeded in killing the words. But why I should lecture you I don’t know.

It seems he's getting conflicting answers, or at least answers that don't quite confirm or deny what he's asking. In the last entry discussing the word, he says:

I am purposely avoiding more discussion of the word “timshel” until I see you and talk to you. Your last letter which suggests “thou canst” moves even closer to free will than “thou mayest.” And if there is still a difference of opinion among scholars, my point is made.

What was said between the two of them is lost to time—there are no notes about how they arrived at their conclusion. But they did arrive—Steinbeck used timshel, a word that many scholars disagree exists. It's probably not true that he made a word up, but he certainly took liberties with meaning to serve his needs.

The whole thing nagged at me for weeks. And not just because of the ramifications of one author interpreting the word to suit his meaning and what happens next. It dawned on me: Why is it that someone who loves words and the act of writing and creating finding herself angry at one of her favorite authors over the idea that he made up a word? What is it in me that resists that idea?

There's a thought here about permission. Do I feel the kind of creative freedom that would grant me permission to reinterpret or make up a word? I’d like to say yes, but that wouldn’t be true at the deepest levels.

There's a thought here about hubris. Who am I to make something up, especially in a language that is not my own?

In those questions, there's an underlying rigidity of thought, a resistance to look into the unknown abyss of creativity and pull out something new, fresh and gleaming, full of potential. In all of those questions, there's the question of a fixed mindset.

At the time, I was sitting at my desk in my office, the same place that I had sweated out the previous year and a half of work on a project I regretted taking on—and at many times hated—all while dealing with the grief and regret of my father's death in the midst of it. To say that I was going through the underworld is an understatement. It was a year and a half of personal hell.

Overrun by both grief and professional writing work, I had no time to nurture my own creative instincts. A book I'd started writing, called Midnight Medicine, languished without resolution. The book was intended to guide readers into the experience of emotional descent safely and then guide them out again. How ironic! But I was well aware that I wasn't quite clear how to guide them out... just as I was not quite clear how to guide myself out.

There was no space to dig into my work like I needed and wanted to. There was no space to create, which led to a certain kind of numbness that made it hard to get excited about anything. It was hard to see where pleasure—any kind of pleasure—lies. My identity was crumbling, as well as my notion of what family means, and I was buried under a mountain of work. Not a great place to be.

At the same time, I had just read Viktor Frankl's work, which led me to question the meaning of my life. The meaning of my choices, and where I found myself at that moment. I had become very good at emotional descent, at going down, but I struggled hard with ascent and levity. There was a part of me that was starting to believe that my apparent inability to be happy had meaning—that I was a flawed, permanently miserable person.

So, I'm sitting at this desk, and I'm looking at someone who I would consider a writing mentor, wondering why the hell he had the gall to make up a word of his own? Is it possible that this deeply meaningful word had no actual meaning the whole time?

My overarching mindset became clear, the way a photo negative becomes revealed in the dim red light of a darkroom. I had developed the belief that things were the way they were. That there was no changing anything. That I was unable to create a new meaning or a new world for myself.

Still picking at the problem, I stumbled on Steinbeck's 1962 Nobel Laureate speech. He was awarded for his "realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception. Although it was awarded after the publishing of East of Eden, he didn't win the prize for any particular work but for his entire oeuvre, his body of work. Here's what he said:

Less than fifty years after [Alfred Nobel’s] death, the door of nature was unlocked and we were offered the dreadful burden of choice.

We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God.

Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world—of all living things.

The danger and the glory and the choice rest finally in man. The test of his perfectibility is at hand.

Having taken Godlike power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have.

Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope.

So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased …

In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man—and the Word is with Men.

This speech was a glimpse into Steinbeck's philosophy on life. This is the philosophy and meaning behind his "made up" word. If you take the scholarly perspective, the way he interpreted timshel is incorrect, meaningless.

But if you take Steinbeck's perspective, it encapsulates the meaning of his entire body of work.

Steinbeck's creative interpretation of timshel haunted me precisely because it mirrored my own struggle with creation and meaning. If timshel itself was partly created, what did that say about all the meanings we hold sacred? This question lingered until an unexpected moment of clarity arrived.

A Ladder To the Stars

Weeks later, I went to a breathwork ceremony. As we slipped into the session, the rhythmic breathing took me into an altered state of consciousness, and the tetany came on pretty quickly and my face and hands started to tingle. Intensity grew and subsided in waves, grew and subsided.

And then I hit a peak and rode the wave of the energy without having to work so hard anymore. There was a feeling I was hoping for, an out-of-body crazy wondrous experience, and the stars that often appear to me in these states. I saw them twinkling, and I heard a voice tell me to open up. I did, and then it came.

I heard the words "a ladder to the stars." I saw that my ladder to the stars is creation. Not meaning, all by itself, but the act of creation. Meaning is something we create and interpret; meaning is a vital part of creating anything. But it is the act of creation that I must practice over and over again—meaning is simply nestled within it.

Timshel was Steinbeck's ladder to the stars. He meant that word. He wasn't copywriting. He wasn't persuading anyone to buy something. He chose it's meaning because no other word came close to what he was trying to express, or touched the essence of what he wanted to say. If the words available—the agreed upon words already in our lexicon or their interpretations—fell short of that essence, then he was going to create what he needed to fulfill the need.

His reinterpretation of the word was the ultimate act of creation. That word still reverberates today and will for some time. It lives in a way that many other words don't, because he brought it to life through story and philosophy.

Everyone has their own ladder to the stars, made not of the "thing"—"creation," or "meaning," or “cooking,” or “writing,” or timshel, but the continual habit of reaching for them over and over and over again, building something new even when part of the ladder falls away.

And then I heard—"It's all made up anyway." Every single word—they were all made up at one point. Every word, every sound, everything human is made up, and it's so easy to forget. Because we are told so often that this is the way it is, those are the words that sink in, and we learn and are expected to act from a place of fixedness, from a place where we all agree that this is the way things are.

It was so light and so airy, that realization, that I started laughing with joy. All of this seriousness about what's real, what's not, what means something and what doesn't, what's fake or poor, or high quality, or whatever. What is “real shamanism” and what is not, what is real art and what is not, what is real writing and what is not—all of it is made up.

Just at the moment, timed to match the cosmic joke playing out in my head, my host said, "Sometimes it's just that simple." Which made me giggle harder. Sometimes it is that simple.

We are always destroying or creating; every move we make supports one energy or the other. We tear down or build up. We grow or die. We descend or ascend. There is no good or bad in that, either—we need both energies. But there is enough pain in the world, and if we don’t want to be swallowed by it, we have to consciously choose what will lead us out of the depths.

Choosing to create your ladder to the stars—whatever that looks like—is an act of perpetual hope. Creating art is my ladder to the stars. I hope you build yours.