Seeking The Grail: The Endless Cup – What Have I Given My Heart To?

I have had periods of creative expression when I felt there was no end to my energy reserves. When I lost track of time. I could feel that rush of vitality running through me, a warmth in the center of my chest. Other times I have felt stuck in the wasteland of apathy, exhaustion, and impotence.

At times when I have felt that my creative well had dried up, I have jumped at the chance to seek an answer to the mystery, the question: how do we fill from the source?

I have seemed to follow the path of the Grail Quest. What is the source, and how do I fill my heart with it? This is a quest I have followed over and over.

Getting the Juices Flowing

Whenever I begin a project, one of my first steps is typically research. As I began looking more deeply into the Grail myth, I found myself pulling together more and more resources. I jumped at the chance to do this exploration because the Grail has always fascinated me.

And I had just spent several years several years of feeling depressed, going in and out of a lingering, low-level exhaustion and tiredness. I had continued to wonder, why can’t I fill up with energy like I once did? Where is the fire of my inspiration? So reading books and taking notes seemed like a safe place to start. A safe place to hide.

This wasn’t like when I was asked to do a graphic design project and found I had no juice, no creative idea, nothing to visually stun someone with. This was just research. I began paging through references and taking notes. About the time I hit sixty pages of notes, I realized something.

I was actually impassioned about a project. I was tireless, excited to wake up and dive back in.

I remembered this feeling, the song of my muse, from the moments when I’ve felt the most fulfilled. But why had this awakened now, and not at other times when I needed it? Why would it come for research, and not when a paying client presented me with a design project?

Sacred Waters of the Source
Percival and the other Knights of the Round Table are asked to seek the Grail. In another story, Aphrodite asks Psyche to go to the river Styx to fill a chalice full of water. Psyche meets the challenge and fills the cup, learning the mystery of filling from the source. Yet she can only fill herself because she has been transformed, on her journey, into a woman who can be filled.

Just as Percival must travel for nearly twenty years before he can become the Knight who can achieve the Grail.

My pilgrimage, my quest for the source, led me to my own center, and to the waters that bring my wasteland back to life. I was able to fill my well with creativity by understanding the center of my heart, and the nature of my wasteland.

And, these waters ebb and they flow. I will return to that wasteland again, and, I will find the waters again. If inspiration moves like water, then it is subject to the tides as well.

Parched Wasteland

The imagery of the Wasteland comes from the Grail Myth, probably the most clear story of filling from a source of water. While researching this idea of how we each fill from the Source, I found a lot of juicy insights in the Grail legend that taught me more about the journey each hero makes. The journey I make.

“The wasteland is a metaphor for a barren psychological landscape where creativity and generativity are absent, where nothing grows and life is meaningless and emotionally flat.”

– Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD

Bolen, a noted psychiatrist, connects the wounds of the Grail wasteland to depression, a feeling of meaninglessness, and a lack of connection to our expanded self and to the Divine. The Grail, the river Styx, and other sacred water sources are often symbols of inspiration, eternal youth, and vitality. Bolen writes, “Being cut off from these sources of personal renewal eventually saps the ability to be creative.” But in order to drink, to become someone who can be filled, I must first know “what ails me.”

The wasteland I’d been dwelling in was formed by my greatest fears: Creative impotence, failure, meaninglessness. But now that I understood what parched me, how could I bring back the flowing waters?

The Waters of my Heart

The research hadn’t hit my heart just yet. Intellectually I understood that water, the source, was sustenance, emotion, the unconscious, and the nonverbal, symbolic mind. My research connected the imagery of water with chalices, the Grail, the heart, and the center.

The center represents the summit of the hero’s journey, pilgrimage, or the center of a labyrinth. The center is transformation; like the river Styx, it stands between life and death.

Bolen connects the concept of the hero’s journey with that symbol of center as both a psychological process of transformation and a pilgrimage leading to communion with the divine. It’s an exterior journey that leads to a rearrangement of the internal architecture. Reaching the wellspring at the center leads to wholeness, healing, meaning, quickening, and feelings of love.

This is also the essence of the pattern of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. It’s also the essence of pilgrimage, to travel over-ground but to transform within, commune with the divine.

I understood that the center of my own heart was the source, but how to reach it? I still had more journeying to do. I hadn’t yet become like Psyche, a woman who could be filled by the source. Or the Knight who achieves the Grail and heals the ailing king.

Going with the Flow

Author Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi helped remind me of something I had forgotten. In his book, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Innovation, he describes the process of creativity as “flow”; that sense of losing track of time, deep focus on our work, and “a feeling of effortlessness”, leading to a “rush of well-being, of satisfaction.”

Csikszentmihalyi notes that flow doesn’t occur while watching TV; flow occurs during “painful, risky, difficult activities that stretched the person’s capacity and involved an element of novelty and discovery.” Those he interviewed were “more responsive to the rewards of discovery … motivated by the enjoyment that comes from confronting challenges.”

Flow activities are the things we love to do, not necessarily the things we are paid to do.

I remembered flow! I knew that feeling of being challenged to capacity, though without anxiety. I remembered the rush of losing hours while totally focused on a creative project. Bolen notes “when people are inspired and creative, love the work they do, or love the people they work with,” they will experience flow. ”Only if our heart is in the work.”

What are the Ways I Water my Soul?

The source, for me, is the joy of spending every bit of energy I have in service to a challenging creative project, a larger vision. To really know my own wellspring, I had to explore the deepest desires of my heart. I asked myself questions from the Diana’s Grove Mystery School, and questions from the book What Color is Your Parachute, focusing on what Joseph Campbell calls “following your bliss.”

What have I given my heart to?

I’m ecstatic when I’ve been awake for three days and am at the peak of physical exhaustion, working on a project. I’m sweaty, my fingernail’s torn, the project’s down to the wire, and suddenly my team and I pull it together and I hear “Wow!” That is my bliss.

I salivate at the thought of defying rational advice to reaching for absurdly huge visions. “That’s impossible” ignites the spark inside my chest, the drive I need to overcome all the challenges. I reach for my heart’s desire when I do meaningful work, when I’m in service to something larger, whether that’s divine communion or just a crazy art project. Or maybe that’s the same thing sometimes.

What do you yearn for? What do you dream of? What do you desire?

The Center of my Heart is Paradox

I imagine that Psyche filled from the source and was energized by the very challenges of the journey she was on, by her desire to reunite with Eros, her beloved. It is perhaps the hero’s task to bring life back to the wasteland. I imagine that Percival was in his element as the seeker on the quest. That it was his job, as a knight, to overcome the greatest of challenges. And only when he came to a challenge that was nearly impossible to overcome could he actually find that mystery. That paradox.

The flowing waters have the rhythm of the heartbeat, emptying in order to fill again.

The way to fill is to pour, to reach for the Divine, to risk being more than you are. The paradox is that spending my own life-force to face a challenge is what fills me from the source. The secret is opening myself up to desire, yearning, risking, much as Psyche did when she began her quest. Much as every knight did in seeking the Grail.

I’ve rediscovered the mystery for myself of needing to feel passion for meaningful work, of seeking challenging projects to ignite my desire, of having a vision and long-term goals to reach for. I’ve remembered that I can do almost anything I set my mind to, as long as it’s impossible at the outset. Or nearly so.

What is the source that deeply sustains you, despite the challenges (or perhaps even because of them)? If love is the eternal source, what do you love?

First published in Between the Worlds, July 2006