Words of Wonder: On Earthly mysteries & the roots of our being
There are teachings, books and writers to whom I return often. Having once been moved by encountering certain wisdoms, I find there are certain words that bed down in my consciousness. Sometimes this is because I've pored over them, transcribed and pondered them in my own private written reflections. Or the sense of what they've evoked in me has touched a nerve somewhere, such that I continue to be moved as life causes me to remember and apply certain ideas.
And so I go back, and see/feel/consider afresh the same texts. It's also because it's what I do, as a reader turned writer. It's because I love a turn of phrase and the magical nature of how words inspire, and because I've learned this from others, that I do what I do.
Lately, this involves writing about, and therefore reading and researching about, humanity's changing relationship with the Earth, our interconnection (and lately, disconnection) with the roots of our being - in ancestral and familial terms, and with regards to the causes and consequences of climate change.
Hence I've been rooting around in stories about the same, learning from, learning how, and working with, writers who who seek to positively change the world, or rather our understanding with it, so as to remember the inherent value of it.
As ever, I share what I've happened upon by way of an invitation for you to similarly do the same - linger over the words, consider what they mean to you, engage with the ideas, be open to what they invoke and evoke. They only mean something when we do that, when we feel, integrate and maybe change our way of being/doing.
After all, isn't that the magic of communication - the way it prompts a response, a connection, a movement in heart, mind and matter? It seems apt to open with the oft-quoted words of James Baldwin:
“You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to how people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimetre the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”
Stories as a gateway to our interbeing
I used to write fiction. I actually wrote a whole collection when I was nine years old (Penguin turned me down, would you believe). Somewhere along the way, for valid albeit arguably self-limiting reasons, I became earnestly serious, prioritising non-fiction, journalism, essays, biographies and philosophy. Lately, I've been reawakening my imaginative side, and reading more novels and short stories. Among the nuggets of wisdom I've collected along the way are these inspiring words from Neil Gaiman, who I've always felt to be true. In fact, my reading life began with novels, which led me to believe in the power of stories, whatever format they take:
“We writers decry too easily what we do as being kind of trivial – the creation of stories. But the magic of escapist fiction is that it can actually offer you a genuine escape from a bad place and, in the process of escaping, it can furnish you with armour, with knowledge, with weapons, with tools you can take back into your life to help make it better. It’s a real escape – and when you come back, you come back better armed than when you left. One of the things that fiction can give us is just the realisation that behind every pair of eyes, there’s somebody like us.”
The Seven Moons of Maali Almedia by Shehan Karunatilaka is one of several novels I read recently. This passage among many examples of his artful turn of phrase struck me in particular:
"All stories are recycled and all stories are unfair. Many get luck and many get misery. Many are born to homes with books, many grow up in the swamps of war. In the end, all becomes dust. All stories conclude with a fade to black."
On the art of writing as a visceral craft
I've been reading a lot of Amy Tan's work. She's adept at humanising the often troubled relationships many of us have with our heritage, our mothers, our lineage and our roots. And of course there is so much more depth asides. The Bonesetter's Daughter is one such example. I loved this description of writing with ink, which reminded me of why I like to write by hand with a fountain pen - because it reminds me of the beauty of the practice and the process - and of the time it necessarily takes to unearth such beauty with our words:
"Good ink cannot be the quick kind, ready to pour out of a bottle. You can never be an artist if your work comes without effort. That is the problem with modern ink from a bottle. You do not have to think. You simply write what is swimming at the top of your brain. And the top is nothing but pond scum, dead leaves, and mosquito spawn. But when you push an inkstick along an inkstone, you take the first step to cleansing your mind and your heart. You push and you ask yourself, What are my intentions? What is in my heart that matches my mind?"
What are we doing here?
Nick Cave's Red Hand Files is one of the newsletters that I've subscribed to that I always set aside time to read. I wish I could say the same, and do the same for others. But time and life being what it is, and the abundance of good writing being as tempting as it is, one has to be selective. I have always appreciated how Cave embraces the beauty in the darkness of life, as part of the whole, how he articulates and illuminates life's shadow side as something to be welcomed rather than feared or avoided. He touches on this frequently, on the importance of optimism, of finding glints of light when we are at our lowest. In his newsletter, he wrote the following in response to a letter he received (he's responded to 200+ now - that in itself is a touching reminder of the power of conversational exchange):
"what are we doing here? That is an excellent question. Personally, I do my best to move through life with a joy that is reconciled to the sorrow of things but is not subsumed by it, that apprehends darkness and is not afraid of it. I try to receive some form of salvation in this life by paying witness to, and being lifted by, the great, uncontested value of existence. I feel duty-bound to unearth, enhance and promote the world's beautiful things rather than obsess, worry and agitate over the worst of things. I believe in creation over destruction, compassion over cynicism, mercy over vitriol, friendship over hostility, truth over lies and love over hate."
Can we ever know anything for sure?
Tias Little's Yoga of the Subtle Body is one of many books I bought years ago when I began studying yoga. I like how his insights weave together the poetry and the wisdom of multiple traditions and lineages. He has an inimitable way of cross referencing teachings from different sources that alert the reader to nuanced ways of waking up to one's own experience. In the opening chapters, he talks of the journey of yoga as one of continual discovery, and of the importance of seeking rather than accumulating wisdom in such a way that keeps opening our eyes ever wider. He quotes the writer Ken Kesey from the latter's essay The Art of Fiction in the Paris Review:
"The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer - they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden where strange plants grow and mysteries blossom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer."
And finally, these words from Eknath Easwaran's introduction to the Dhammapada, another favourite text, which needs no embellishment from me:
"We are not cabin dwellers, born to a life cramped and confined; we are meant to explore, to seek, to push the limits of our potential as human beings. The world of the senses is just a base camp: we meant to be as much at home in consciousness as in the world of physical reality."