The Quiet Voice of Courage

Vocabulary of the Soul

From caring comes courage.

〰 Lao Tzu 〰

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Courage to Grieve

Truly grieving is one of the most courageous acts that one can undertake.

Truly grieving is a sacred practice.

〰 Chloe Hope 〰

A recent exchange with fellow substacker Chloe Hope (author of Death & Birds) drew my attention to the topic of courage.

“Truly grieving is, in my opinion, one of the most courageous acts that one can undertake—not least because it requires us to be present to the reality in which our loss has occurred.” Chloe writes in her post Two Wings.

The definition startled me. What does grieving have to do with courage?

In response, a Lao Tzu quote stirred in my memory. He mentions two kinds of courage, one directed outward, the other inward.

A man with outward courage dares to die; a man with inner courage dares to live.

〰 Lao Tzu 〰

Lao Tzu’s ‘outward courage’ is the one we normally think of when using this word, the courage associated with bravery, with overcoming fear in the face of danger, the guts to fight physical (and mental) battles, the ‘gutsy’ courage to die.

Grief calls for the other one ~ the courage that dares to live ~ to continue living, to engage with life after a significant loss or heartbreak.

Chloe’s statement also sparked the memory of a book I read a few months ago ~ Brave New Medicine ~ a courage to pursue paths of healing beyond anthropocentric medical practices.

This book moved me deeply and resonates with my understanding of trauma, grief, inexplicable (= incurable?) illness, and healing. The author, Cynthia Li, trained as a medical doctor and practiced internal medicine for a few years before a disabling autoimmune condition put an abrupt end to the life she’d known and taken for granted.

Cynthia’s healing journey started with treatment protocols she’d been taught in medical school. Due to unsatisfactory results (+ disturbing side-effects), she explored ancient and contemporary integrative therapies, desperate to find her way back to functioning in ‘normal’ life.

Peeling away layers of a conventional medical career and mindset, she stumbled upon places in her inner world where personal and ancestral grief lay buried. During this healing process, over several years, Cynthia attended a ‘grief ritual’ lead by Francis Weller.

As a psychotherapist and ‘soul activist’, Weller believes that grief is a skill we have to develop in order to ‘ripen as human beings.’ For this purpose he offers grief work, based on personal experience of living with indigenous communities in Africa.

On the day of the workshop, Cynthia walks into “a room full of thirty mostly gray-haired folks, seated in a circle” around an “altar of remembrance.”

“It takes courage to be here,” Francis Weller welcomes his grieving clients.

Cynthia isn’t sure about the cause of her grief. “I didn’t know specifically what I was there to grieve,” she writes.

Although memories of Kurt run through the first chapters of her story like veins of a precious ore, informing the reader that her beloved fiancé died in a car crash just before their wedding, she doesn’t (yet) connect the shattering loss and heartbreak with her physical suffering.

During that ritual she begins to understand, begins to feel grief quiver towards courage, as her heartache breaks through the crust of bravery, as collective grieving permeates the field, as the dam of sorrows bursts, and the flood of choked back tears and sobs erupts to wash all the painful memories of the past to the surface of the present.

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The Heart of Courage

Courage originally meant

‘To speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.’

〰 Brené Brown 〰

Courage [from Latin cor = heart] migrated from French into English around 1300 with the meaning of spirit, temperament, state of mind, and heart in its figurative sense.

In early usage, English courage was a word with a broad definition, covering a wide range of goings-on in human minds, including bravery, confidence, evil, free will, lust, pride, self-worth, strength, and wrath.

Valour [from Latin valor = value, worth] appeared first in English in the original sense. Its meaning extended towards inner strength, courage from the 1580s.

The use of audacity, boldness, bravery, intrepidness, valour etc. as synonyms for courage developed over time. All of these words relate to a heroic inner state of mind when faced with mortal danger, Lao Tzu’s ‘courage to die’.

Brené Brown’s definition, ‘to speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart’ captures a more general disposition of wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve.

English words related to courage are

Cordial ~ heartfelt, full of kindness, warm and friendly. Sweet fruit drink; liqueur

Core ~ heart, innermost part, used in the literal and figurative sense

Credence ~ belief, trust

Credentials ~ that which entitles to credit

Credenza ~ an Italian sideboard where food was tested before being served to the king as a precaution against poison

Credit ~ a loan entrusted to another, goods and services offered before payment, public acknowledgment or praise, good reputation

Credo ~ statement of beliefs

Creed ~ religious belief, faith

and other ‘cred-’ nouns and adjectives ~ credible, credulous, incredible etc.

Moreover, the Latin ancestor cor (= heart) also reproduced in a number of verbs and nouns ending in -cord

Accord ~ (v) agree, be consistent with, grant recognition; (n) an official agreement or treaty, agreement, harmony

Concord ~ (n) agreement, union of opinions, harmony, mutual friendship

Discord ~ (n) disagreement, strife

Record ~ (n) testimony, written statement, official report, list of achievements of activities; (v) put down in writing, capture on audio or video file.

Intimate links between the words courage and heart show up in the space between languages as well as in synonyms:

The English to take heart, translates into Mut schöpfen (= to draw courage) in German.

To pluck up courage becomes sich ein Herz fassen (= to seize one’s own heart)

To lose heart translates as den Mut verlieren (= to lose courage)

Courageous can be translated poetically with beherzt (= full of heart)

Disheartened is entmutigt in German (= discouraged)

Feeling discouraged may be described in German as das Herz sinkt (= the heart sinks)

A heartening gesture or word would be called ermutigend (= encouraging)

And to hearten someone translates as ermutigen in German (= to encourage s.o.)

We may draw courage from what we take to heart or what breaks our heart.

Courage can be a driving force as much as a source of healing, available to each of us. Courage is a wellspring that bubbles up at the heart the inner world.

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The Soul of Courage

It takes courage to grow

and become who you really are.

〰 E.E. Cummings 〰

Outer courage is not an emotion. Outer courage is a skill. You could call it an inner strength driving outer action, which can be exercised and developed, like any skill.

Colloquially also called balls (= testicles), cojones (= terticles in Spanish, guts (= bowels), nerves (= neurons), pluck (= viscera, plucked from a carcass), and spunk (= seminal fluid), it seems to be associated with physical organs or bodily activity.

This doesn’t mean outer courage itself is a physiological function. But the expression of outer courage is largely related to physical action.

Outer courage is synonymous with bravery, boldness, fearlessness and the antipode to cowardice.

Inner courage is no emotion either. Inner courage is a quality of being and becoming.

In Ancient Greece, philosophers thought of courage as a virtue of the soul. Courageous people were said to have enduring or strong souls. Courage was defined as strength of the soul.

If soul, known as the animate principle, or what distinguishes a living human body from a dead corpse, is the bearer of courage ~ as our ancient Greek ancestors asserted ~ then courage is an expression of the soul.

Or, perhaps more proactively, the Soul can at times express herself through courage. Since outer courage is associated with death (= courage to die), and inner courage with life, it stands to reason that the language of the Soul veers towards the courage to live.

Outer courage (to die) shows up when a Braveheart is prepared to give his life for his country. Inner courage (to live), by contrast, is the one described by E.E. Cummings. The courage to become who you really are.

Virginia Woolf grappled with the same threads of thought when she wrote, “This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.”

For the philosophers in Ancient Greece courage as the core value of the soul did not stand alone. They found it accompanied by other virtues, such as endurance, justice, temperance and wisdom.

Later philosophers, thinkers and writers have extended the vocabulary of the soul further, adding virtues such as truth, resilience, kindness, integrity, and authenticity.

“After all, one should have the courage to believe in what is good,” said Sophie Scholl, a young German student in the 1940s. “I do not mean that one should believe in illusions, but I mean that one should do only what is true and good and take it for granted that other people will do the same, in a way one can never do with the intellect alone.”

Sophie Scholl was a member of the White Rose (resistance movement in Nazi Germany). She became an epitome of courage for living true to her values. Convicted of high treason for distributing anti-war leaflets, she was executed in 1943, a couple of months before her 22nd birthday.

Courage, in the Anthropocene, is associated with warfare, heroism, and superhuman valour, as long as the brave soul stands and fights on the ‘right side’ of the front line. Risking and losing one’s life is celebrated as the greatest courage of all (= the outer courage).

Sophie Scholl had both, inner and outer courage. However, to celebrate her courage while young activists all over the world are being arrested, tortured, gunned down, or burnt alive fills my heart with grief that drenches my soul.

Celebration of human bravery after such a cruel fate smacks of the Anthropocene feasting on a young life, guided by what is true and good, while driving the descendants of Sophie’s spirit down the same route of inhumanity.

In the Symbiocene, to be oneself and believe in what is good is everyone’s birthright. It should not take superhuman courage to defend and claim what is true. Sophie’s guideline ‘that one should do only what is true and good and take it for granted that other people will do the same’ must be the norm. And courage cannot lead to cruelty.

Courage doesn’t require grand gestures. Our own heart may simply nudge us to take small steps towards our own truth, following the still small voice of the soul.

Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying

~ I will try again tomorrow.

〰 Mary Anne Radmacher 〰

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