The Journey

It all began one night while I was reading Zen in the Art of Archery.  No, that’s not quite right.  I’m not sure where it really began.  Perhaps in college when I played golf for the first time at the very same time that I played my first varsity golf tournament on a thrown-together Davidson College Title IX team.  Or maybe it began when I was marooned in Brandon, Manitoba, with a soon-to-be husband/eventually ex-husband who played golf.  Not much to do in Brandon, I decided to tackle golf.  Rich Bull, a local pro, helped me as much as he could, gave me a lesson a week, put me on a 5-day-a-week practice plan, and I played local courses, sometimes even alone, whenever I got the chance.  I got marginally better, but there was always a huge discrepancy between the way I practiced and the way I played.  In short, I was a nut case on the course.

Not a throwing clubs, yelling-and-screaming nut case, more the kind that implodes and suffers deeply with every shot.  After the divorce, I quit the game cold turkey, figuring I’d take it up again when I was old and retired.  Over the next decade, I played a few times, but it wasn't until cousins in Kentucky talked me into playing nine holes with them that--boom--the bug was back.  I started into practice, lessons, and play in New Smyrna Beach, FL. All I wanted to do was play golf.  Once again, though, more improvement on the driving range and putting green didn’t tranfer into lower scores.  By this time, I’d begun to see my golf failings as spiritual failings.  My ego was too much involved; worrying about previous shots or my future score, I was almost never in the present moment; acceptance and surrender were not in my golf vocabulary.

Eventually I quit again. Too much time.  Too much money. Too much energy.  Too much suffering.   I was back on the wagon.  I fell off a few times over the next decade to play now and then, but the obsession didn’t take root.  Then I started dating a golfer, and after only twice back on the course, the game had re-hooked me.  I could feel it reeling me in. 

And that brings me back to Zen in the Art of Archery, by Eugen Herrigel, a German philosophy professor who decided to tackle the spiritual art of archery while working in Japan in the late 1940s.  In the spring of 2010, as I read Herrigel’s account of his archery progress under an exacting master, I realized that that’s what my golf game had been missing: a systematic spiritual focus to go along with the technical focus.  I knew many of the technical problems with my swing, even if I had a hard time correcting them. And I also knew that I had major spiritual problems that came into sharp relief when I played golf.  What I needed was someone to counsel me on the intersection of my two paths toward decent golf—the technical and the spiritual.  What I wanted was a Bagger Vance or a Shivas Irons—a mystical teacher to coach me on the mysteries of the game as they relate to the soul, as they relate to life.

So that’s when the blog idea hit, a fully formed project that presented itself in a flash of insight.  I would take a year and focus on the intersection between my golf game and my spiritual growth.  I would search for help with that intersection wherever I could find it—books, movies, golf pros, spiritual teachers, anyone or anything that could help me get rid of my self as I play the game. 

And because I know I’m not alone in this frustration with a game so inspiring, so confounding, so complex, I decided to write about what I learn over the course of this year in a blog: www.holeinoneness.com.  Like many of us, I appear to have a hole in my oneness.  The hole itself is an illusion that stems from my idea that the golf ball, the hole, and I are all separate. For the next year, I'll focus on transcending the illusion and learning to see that the ball, the hole, and I all blend into the fabric of wholeness--oneness. In this way, I trust that the game of golf will, most of all, teach me joy.

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