Alexandersmap

    Tag: Philosophy

    • What is Precious

      What is precious
      inside us does not
      care to be known
      by the mind
      in ways that diminish
      its presence.
      -David Whyte, The Winter of Listening

      A storm pivots around New England, sideways rain one minute, bright sunshine the next. Cold wind pushing the swirling mix about, demanding attention. I step outside and look for the rainbow that must be out there somewhere. Nothing but icy rain greets me. I quickly abort the mission and hustle back inside.

      Some days rainbows appear out of seemingly nowhere. Some days conditions diminish the very possibility. Likewise, bold ideas come to us when we’re quietly resolved and ready to hear them. Our most precious and colorful thoughts are sometimes evasive. Maybe it just isn’t their time. Or maybe it isn’t ours.

      When the student is ready the master will appear. If we are open to hearing the call. If we open our minds to possibility. The funny thing about rainbows is that they always appear directly opposite of the sun.

    • Like Stone Nestles on Stone

      “Poetry is language against which we have no defenses.” – David Whyte

      I’ve been spending a bit of time with David Whyte lately, catching up on words I ought to have read long ago but wasn’t ready to hear. I was a different person then, more closed to the world despite the outward bravado. You learn who you are through the windy path of words flowing from you onto the page. And then you set them free to find an audience ready for that particular jumble of words to add to their own foundation.

      Let the words join
      one to another
      the way stone nestles on stone,
      the way water just leaves
      and goes to the sea,
      the way your promise
      breathes and belongs
      with every other promise
      the world has ever made.

      Now, leave them to go on,
      let your words
      carry their own life,
      without you, let the promise
      go with the river.
      Have faith. Walk away.
      – David Whyte, To Break a Promise (Cúnga Fheichin)

      For me releasing the words into the wild is a form of building my own foundation. Each place visited, each poem immersed in, and each mountain climbed is like stone nestled on stone joined together just so as a work very much in progress. Building a life out of adventurous conspiracies and schemes, written down and sent on their way out into the world for you to see.

      “The act of writing anything worthwhile always takes place at that strange and sometimes disturbing crossroads where aloneness and intimacy meet… This break of the boundary between what we think is a self and what we think is other than our self is where the rich vein of beauty and insight become a reward in and of itself, and where the words suddenly seem to belong to everyone.” – David Whyte, from the forward of Essentials

      Experience and words create that thing that is other than our selves. It’s the building of that puzzle that is our self one piece at a time. What seems a chaotic pile on the table slowly forms into a picture of who we are. The funny thing about a puzzle is you finish and throw it all back in the box and build another picture. You can’t build another part of your identity until you clear the table of the old one.

      So which is it? Are words and experience stacked together like a stone wall or foundation, laid to be resilient, or like a puzzle built very much the same way but temporary in nature? That’s one of those forest for the trees questions, isn’t it? The universe views the stacked stones and the stack of words the way it views those jigsaw puzzles on the table. Everything is temporal. Words are like carbon, momentarily ours and one day something else entirely.

      I believe we ought to keep stacking words and building new puzzles, but to do it for the joy of the process. To set those words free to fly on their own. Scattered throughout the world to land where they may. To that meeting place between aloneness and intimacy.

    • Living That Last Word

      See with every turning day,
      how each season wants to make a child
      of you again, wants you to become
      a seeker after rainfall and birdsong,
      watch now, how it weathers you to a
      testing
      in the tried and true, tells you
      with each falling leaf, to leave and slip
      away,
      even from that branch that held you,
      to go when you need to, to be courageous,
      to be like that last word you’d want to say
      before you leave the world.
      – David Whyte, Coleman’s Bed

      We all move through the world at our pace, seeing things as our mind opens our eyes to them. I could never have read this poem ten years ago and seen it the way I do today. I wonder at who I might be in another ten years, should I be so bold as to expect the time.

      We all transform over time and place, in each conversation and with every realization. We get consumed with thoughts of whether we do enough or become enough, we reach a point where we gently push such self-talk away or let it eat us alive. But the question isn’t whether we’ve done enough at all. It’s simply, have we lived enough?

      When you’re lying on your death bed someday 50 years from now or maybe tonight, what will your last word in this earth be? What are the last thoughts racing through your fading mind? Will you smile in your last breath or will a tear form in your eye? That person in that last moment wants you to be courageous today.

    • Moving through Liminal Space

      If 2020 was a year of transformation forced upon all of us by a pandemic and political and social unrest, then what is 2021? A continuation of the same or something different entirely? We see the light at the end of the tunnel, but we’re still very much in the tunnel. Are we in limbo, or is it something else?

      I don’t know what life will show me
      But I know what I’ve seen
      I can’t see where life will lead me
      But I know where I’ve been
      – Jimmy Cliff, Sitting Here in Limbo

      “Limbo” originally was the region on the border between Heaven and Hell, now commonly thought of as being stalled in a period of transition. Plenty of us felt like 2020 was Limbo. But you can make a case for it to be something more.

      This place of transformation between one place or phase and the other is also known as “liminal space”. I’d first heard the phrase from Richard Rohr, who points to Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process as the origin. Rituals seem straightforward: sweet sixteen parties, bar mitzvahs, commencement ceremonies and funerals are all rites of passage signaling a change. But what of the passage itself? Passage is motion, not stalling. And that’s where liminality comes in.

      “Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold” is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. During a rite’s liminal stage, participants “stand at the threshold” between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which completing the rite establishes.” – Wikipedia

      The passage through “liminal space” infers movement between phases of life. This seems a more focused use of the time, don’t you think? Passage is high agency, decide what to be and go be it liminality. Stalled is low agency, waiting for things to happen to us limbo. You see this in how people use their time during the pandemic. Some bought and used bicycles and hiking boots, others hoarded toilet paper and literally waited for shit to happen.

      Life is about transformation and passage. If we’re all in this transition between one place and another, are we using this liminal space to proactively move into a better place or are we simply waiting for things to open up again? The thing about passages is you have some measure of control over the direction you’re going in. We ought to have something to say about which threshold we cross on the other side, don’t you think?

    • Friends with the Sky

      “One of the many ways we have made ourselves lonely without gaining the deeper nourishment and intimacies of true aloneness, is the way we have lost the greater supporting circle of friendship available to us in the created, natural world: to be friends with the sky, the rain, the changing light of a given day and the horizon always leading us beyond the circle we have drawn too readily for ourselves.” – David Whyte, from the forward of Essentials

      I’ve often wondered at loneliness. I’m rarely lonely, but I’m often alone. I think the root of it lies in Whyte’s observation about the greater supporting circle – a connection to the world around you and with your own inner voice. Nothing awakens your relationship with the world like lingering with it on its terms.

      One of the things I miss about having a dog is that forced connection with the outside, no matter the weather. It’s easy to just stay inside when it’s raining sideways or bitter cold. But having a dog forces your hand – they’ve gotta go, and you must connect them with the place they go. Letting them out is a cop-out. You must walk as a true offering to the pet gods.

      This connection to the outdoors doesn’t require a dog, I’ve had similar connection with hiking, rowing and sailing where you’re forced to deal with nature as it comes to you. When you’re a small part of the natural world you tend to see it differently than you might looking at a screen from the comfort of a favorite chair. Nature demands that we meet it with respect and reverence, and in return we awaken something deeper in us.

      I suppose a circle drawn around us feels like a hug or the blankets you pull over yourself on the coldest nights. The problem with a tight circle is that it’s inherently limiting. Getting out under the open sky and feeling the elements, you recognize that you’re alone, yet a part of something bigger than yourself. When you see the world outside that old circle, you’re never quite the same.

      Loneliness is a state of isolation derived from looking inward. Connection is looking outward, and beyond yourself. Stepping outside the circle is a courageous act if you haven’t spent much time there, but it leads to a world that is alive with wonder. A sensory world of conversations in many dimensions. A world where we can become more than whatever it was you were when contained in that circle. That’s where you’ll find larger possibility. You’ll never be lonely outside your comfort zone.

    • What Shape Waits in the Seed of You?

      Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
      toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
      what urgency calls you to your one love?
      What shape waits in the seed of you
      to grow and spread its branches
      against a future sky?
      Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
      In the trees beyond the house?
      In the life you can imagine for yourself?
      In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?
      – David Whyte      , ‘What to Remember When Waking‘

      We get lost in the person we told ourselves we’d be today when we were someone else yesterday. To-do lists and created obligations conspire to hold you to what your scheduled to be. There’s a future you being created in that schedule that should make you burst out of bed with excitement. But waiting a beat or two to listen to the calling informs.

      I’ve mentioned before that I do a one line per day entry at the end of the day. I sometimes wake up thinking about it, contemplating how I might make the line worthy of the ink. Worthy of the day crossed off the short list of days we have on this earth.

      Morning writing forces the hand, you might say. It forces you to reconcile the whispers before getting to those other things. I highly recommend it for anyone looking to figure out what that voice is actually saying in your ear. And when you hear it, what then? Does it chafe against that which you’ve planned for yourself?

      The beginning of the day sets our course based on the conditions and circumstances we find ourselves in. We know where we’d like to go, but must reconcile it with our current reality. With our previous expectations for ourselves, set on the calendar. The question is whether we’ve left ourselves the room to grow into that future sky. The answer, like the question, lingers in that quiet, solitary moment.

    • Bridging the Tragic Gap

      I spoke with a friend who is experiencing some PTSD after all the extremist action and rhetoric of the last few years. I don’t have anything to offer but support and faith in progress. Words, really, backed by optimism. But I know I don’t see the world the same way that someone targeted by bigotry and hate does, nor do I feel the gut punch of lost hope and lack of opportunity that the marginalized and enraged feel. I tend to reside in the middle, seeing the possibility of a future where the gaps between us disappear. But the cold reality is that won’t happen in my lifetime. And there lies the tragic gap.

      “By the tragic gap I mean the gap between the hard realities around us and what we know is possible — not because we wish it were so, but because we’ve seen it with our own eyes…
      I call it “tragic” because it’s a gap that will never close, an inevitable flaw in the human condition. No one who has stood for high values — love, truth, justice — has died being able to declare victory, once and for all. If we embrace values like those, we need to find ways to stand in the gap for the long haul, and be prepared to die without having achieved our goals…
      That means we need to change our calculus about what makes an action worth taking and get past our obsession with results. – Parker Palmer, The Sun interview, If Only We Would Listen

      There is a lot to chew on in this 2012 interview, but it’s Parker’s concept of the tragic gap that took hold. For those of us who fancy ourselves bridge-builders, it resonates. For we fill the gap with love and possibility, only to see the divide grow as more people embrace the extremes on either side. Knowing what’s possible and how far we seem to be from it are frustrating at best, tragic at worst.

      So what are we to do? Change our calculus and not obsess with results? Modify expectations and chase the small victories that get us incrementally closer? You see the friction in the world as the two sides of the gap pull away from each other and wonder if bridge-building is even possible. Seen from the lens of history progress is clear, but we never quite get all the way there before the gaps seems to grow again. But is this a trick of the mind at work, just so much amplified noise? The optimism in me believes we’re closer than we sound like we are. With much work still to do.

      “I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

      It’s a tough blow to realize we will never be bridge the tragic gap in our lifetimes, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Seeing our own unarmed truth for what it is and doing our small part offers tangible, incremental progress. Each of us, small links in the chain, reaching across the chasm to find a link to a better future. Beyond us, but out there waiting.

    • Something More

      “The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.” Neil Gaiman

      This rather cheery quote by Gaiman prompts a challenge of sorts from me. For making something isn’t what makes the world brighter, making something you care about making is what brightens the world. For in the making of something in such a way you honor the world with your contribution.

      As Gaiman rightly points out, we’re lovingly placing something that wasn’t there before out in the world for it to embrace. Will it fly or get lost in the noise? It’s not up to us to decide. It’s up to us to create it and set it free. And then to get back to the business of building another beacon.

      The best of our work becomes accretive rather than reductive. Look around, there’s plenty of people creating hateful, mean-spirited work that divides and diminishes the world. But not us, no: we offer something more. Something that resonates across the table and across time. For the very best work becomes timeless.

      So what makes something timeless? I believe it’s the deep connection between two people that your work represents. Paint placed just so on canvas. Architecture that stirs the heart generations after the last stones were laid. Words that transcend the author or poet and connect one soul to another. This is what brightens the world. This is the shining soul beacon of the artist that keeps hope alive, like a Fresnel lens lights the distance in a turbulent dark sea:

      “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      “Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”
      – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

      “Tell me, what is it you plan to do
      with your one wild and precious life?”
      – Mary Oliver, The Summer Day

      “If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.”
      – Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

      “This above all: to thine own self be true,
      And it must follow, as the night the day,
      Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
      – William Shakespeare, Hamlet

      All words across time, offering a path through the darkness in the world. Offering hope and direction and illumination. This is something more. And this is our opportunity too. Great artists are ambassadors to the world, bridge builders to the future, and infinite soul connectors. That’s something to aspire to.

    • What You Are Not

      In order to arrive at what you are not
      You must go through the way in which you are not.
      And what you do not know is the only thing you know
      And what you own is what you do not own
      And where you are is where you are not.
      – T.S. Eliot, East Coker

      This is the way: we march on through the unknown, discovering the world and ourselves in each step. That’s part of getting older and, too infrequently, wiser. We don’t know our identity until we’ve reached beyond that which we’ve done before. Life is the sorting it all out part in between steps. Knowing with certainty that this thing is not my thing. But maybe the next thing is… or maybe not.

      I know I don’t have all the answers, but I do know that the more we learn and grow and experience, the more we recognize ourselves in the patterns and energy around us. The more we encounter that which is not us, the more we seek another way. Life is learning to navigate the channel even when it isn’t clearly marked. You experience a few bumps along the way but you don’t sink unless you’re reckless.

      If we have any freedom at all eventually we stumble into uncharted territory. Some turn right around and go back to where they came from, trusting the familiar over the uncertain. But life changes around you whether you’re a willing participant or not. So embrace the things you don’t know and revel in the discovery.

      You can’t possibly know what being a parent is like until you’ve had children. And you can’t really understand until you’ve nudged them through each stage of their own lives. I say this knowingly, but also knowing what I don’t know as they grow beyond the previously familiar. And so we learn together and embrace the unknown.

      This is just the next step in the journey for each of us. We all reached the pandemic and experienced the changes it made in us. Some grew, others crawled to darker places. But we were all transformed over twelve months and will be again as we rediscover the changes in those we once thought we knew. If it wasn’t the pandemic it would have been graduations or career changes or major life events. Change is part of the game.

      Where you were is not where you are now. And so it follows that where you are is where you are not going to be soon enough. Accept that for what it is and step boldly into the unknown. For there you’ll find yourself.

    • Trust Our Heaviness

      How surely gravity’s law,
      strong as an ocean current,
      takes hold of the smallest thing
      and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

      Each thing—
      each stone, blossom, child —
      is held in place.
      Only we, in our arrogance,
      push out beyond what we each belong to
      for some empty freedom.

      If we surrendered
      to earth’s intelligence
      we could rise up rooted, like trees.

      Instead we entangle ourselves
      in knots of our own making
      and struggle, lonely and confused.

      So like children, we begin again
      to learn from the things,
      because they are in God’s heart;
      they have never left him.

      This is what the things can teach us:
      to fall,
      patiently to trust our heaviness.
      Even a bird has to do that
      before he can fly.
      by Rainer Maria Rilke, How Surely Gravity’s Law

      It’s been a long time since I posted an entire poem, but Rilke’s demands a full reading. And if I were bolder I might just leave it there by itself, instead of injecting my own commentary on the world. But a blog (to me) necessarily demands contribution not simply reposting. And so my own words dare to follow Rilke’s, reaching for a place at the table.

      The key word in the poem is surrendered: to earth’s intelligence, to God’s heart if you will, to our own heaviness. You realize your imperfection and embrace it. In doing so you recognize the entanglements and struggles in others. You accept them for what they are as well. And learn to trust others and most of all your own voice.

      You reach a point in life where you let go of it all and to stop worrying about place and whether you’ve earned it. You stop worrying about everything, really. The work remains, but the will is stronger. You’ve rooted yourself to things tangible and true and begin to rise up.

      To push out beyond. Grounded. And anchored so, we begin to fly.