Tag: words

Within

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When there is silence, one finds the anchor of the Universe within oneself

Lao Tzu

There are times when words cannot be found and we’re all familiar with that fact, though that doesn’t stop us from straining and struggling to find the right words to articulate whatever is going on in us. Yes: whatever is going on in us. The billions of things going on in us, always and everywhere. There’s a clue in this – for whatever’s going on does a great deal of its going on in us. I wonder if others, like me, get frightened sometimes, like a person drowning, paddling furiously and shouting in terror, unaware that a rescuer, swimming swiftly and silently, steadied by a life belt, will reach them only seconds from now?

All of this comes to mind, in this late evening, in hushed Edinburgh, in silence. And for a while I observe words tumbling into the silence. Explanations. Questions. Expectations. Prayers. Protestations. Until, until … because it’s late and the words have been tumble-drying around and around in the spinner all day, the silence prevails. An ocean of silence. An ocean doing its ebbing and flowing ocean-thing within. And oddly there’s no panic here, but a kind of undergirding depth instead. This is immeasurable comfort to me, for if – after all my words of ‘life and death’ subside – I can know what it is to be held, to be ‘rescued’ if you like, then it must ultimately be so for all others as well. This safe and peace-filled holding in the silence must also be for the people – alive and dead – that I have longed for, and do long for, as they have faced, or are facing, illness, suffering, cruelty, warfare, profound aloneness – crying out to the heavens for words, for answers. The words eventually give way to the undergirding and sustaining silence. A kind of – perhaps an actual – paradise, even if only for a nano-second sometimes, available to us in the here and now, wheresoever our here, and our now …

When there is silence, one finds the anchor …

Ah, dear Love, for all souls lost for words, may it be so.

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A Universal Song

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Writing is a journey of discovery that takes me places that I never expected …

… a friend wrote to me today. And – in the way of such things – I have been taken thereby to places that I never expected, wondering all day about the extraordinary gift of languages in words, and in music, which can sometimes transport our words so exquisitely.

When I was first moved by Les Miserables in the 1990s I remember being sure in my mind that Marius’ grieving in Herbert Kretzmer’s Empty Chairs and Empty Tables was not for one revolution alone, but for every reflection and reconsideration of past, present and potential. A Universal Song.

Hearts are breaking all over the world for innumerable reasons today. Too many empty chairs and empty tables. I find myself awed by the purity of young Cormac Thompson’s rendition here – a clarity that carries an invitation to reflect straight to human hearts.

May our words be quiet, kind and clear; may our music sometimes be hope-filled silence – so that we really hear both, allowing ourselves to be reshaped, that we may the better transform our world. A quiet revolution. Thus may we be taken to unexpected, perhaps joy-filled and hopeful places.

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Concepts

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Hmm. There has been, I think it’s fair to say, a breeze of hot air in the inner courts of Westminster this week – just as in most weeks, and just as in my own conversations with myself! By chance I came across some pondering from way back in Summer 2016 today. I’ll carry the re-reading with me into the coming week …

When we have put it into words
windinmywheels.com – 11 July 2016

Another day of surprises in British politics – and a new Prime Minister (Teresa May) lined up for Wednesday evening. I wish outgoing and incoming leadership every possible success. The burdens of high office are immeasurable – and are incalculably demanding across any and all party boundaries.

As I’ve suggested many times before, it would be the sea of words that would most get to me. Language is the vehicle of depth and of essence – but is too easily trivialised, tripping off tongues that have too many, too quick, demands made of them. Something in me insists on reaching deeper than the mere surface meaning of words – and it’s a reaching inwards that I aspire to, every bit as much as a reaching outwards. Richard Holloway has put a finger on why:

… we are creatures who use language and sometimes only know that we know something when we have put it into words. We are, therefore, destined to struggle with language and concepts, to find the words that approximate to the realities we encounter. We must recognise a fundamental difficulty with this at the outset: language can sometimes suggest the reality of the thing to which it refers, but it can never be the thing to which it refers. This is true when we are talking about one another and human experience; it is trebly true in our attempts to describe spiritual realities. Language is analogical, it describes by likening one thing to another; or it is metaphorical, it operates by using dramatic figures of speech that suggest the reality of the thing described in an image or a sound sequence, such as Tennyson’s

The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.

Language is revelatory. It can bring us close to the reality described but we always have to remember that it is not itself the reality. It is an interpretation, a way of thinking about something, but never exactly the thing itself; it is flesh made word.

Richard Holloway
The Stranger in the Wings

So be we president, prime minister, prophet or observing person in the street, any and all who write, or place their hope in human manifestos must also “hear” them, deep within, if ever we’re to believe that flesh made word might truly be turned into word made flesh.

Yes: leadership on the one hand and “ordinary” human lives on the other are tough calls! Talk is not the same as action – and shouldn’t always be allowed to trump the wisdom found in deep reflection and silence. And too hasty action can sometimes be worse than none.

There are no easy answers to be found when it comes to the governance of nations, nor even of our own governance of ourselves. All humankind then ought to do everything it can to reach deeper than merely skimming words.

When we have put it into words
windinmywheels.com – 11 July 2016

Questions and no answers

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Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort. As long as I have questions and no answers I’ll keep on writing.

Clarice Lispector
Hour of the Star

There’s no music without depth of silence upon which to paint notes. Often I have shared my love of ‘silent music’ – the spaces in between. Absence of answers, the unfinished, the infinite, the eternal, the questions – are as important to me as expressed chords and symphonies, every bit as important to me as the words I yearn to read, and shape upon my tongue, and set down upon a page, and have engraved upon my heart, occupying my days and nights, my soul-work, my love, my leisure.

It’s not arriving, or the making of judgments, proclamations, speeches or songs that draws me towards the eternal. It’s living with questions that have no trite answers. Writing, reading, making poetry and prayer, long-savouring notes and words, meditating before the great backdrop of silence. Effort. Gratitude. Occasionally glimpsing an Eden of simplicity.