Gorgeous poetry. I read Caroline’s post. I have such a tortured relationship to words. I hate them, but they are all that I have most of the time. I’ve thought about writing a Substack, but I just keep thinking.....”how many more words do we need?!” I want to write poetry 4 lines long on napkins. I want my words to be pregnant with all the other words.
I am however, grateful there so many of you who don’t feel this way about words. See! Tortured.
Hey Shari. More and more I slip out of the normal either/or of individual vs. collective. In the work of Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti she harmonizes with Da Silva and others to offer a third way which she tentatively labels the metabolic. I didn't post it today but the more prose-ish piece connected to these poems mentions your words on the lambs and parts of it are infused with that gravity as well as questions picked up listening in to that Israel chat on the Grail. Once we really get how entangled we are in each other, especially when we risk any certainties and open the space to let the language between us light the world with its interactions and tensions wording becomes not individual, or even collective, but that metabolic in some modest at first (until we really begin to let it run) but very real ways.
I more and more value the substacks where quotes and allusions to other substacks begin to lose any right to say "Here is my thoughts, and mine alone."
“When nonlocality guides our imaging of the universe, difference is not a manifestation
of an unresolvable estrangement, but the expression of an elementary entanglement. That is, when the social reflects The Entangled World, sociality becomes neither the cause nor the effect of relations involving separate existants, but the uncertain condition under which everything that exists is a singular expression of each and every actual-virtual other existant.”
So many things come to mind reading this essay. Goethe first and foremost, although I have not read a single book he has written, I understand him through people like Rudolf Steiner and George MacDonald. At some point I will need to dedicate my busy hands to holding and paging through one of his books. Another is Iain McGilchrist and of course he leans heavily in the same direction. https://humanjourney.us/intercultural/iain-mcgilchrist-the-matter-with-things-review/
But another stands out to me. Owen Barfield, who also relished Steiner and therefore Goethe, for it was Goethe who baptized his imagination.
I’m so ill educated when it comes to philosophy not having studied or read any of those philosophers in the essay, but I seem to find myself standing in the midst of their thought experiments. And I want to ask them if it’s working out the way they thought it would because you see, nothing ever works out the way we think it should or could. It’s always something completely different, to steal a phrase from Monty Python. (Those geniuses!)
Barfield declares that we are in a withdrawal of participation. That is correct as far as I can tell, and there is no going back. I find this exciting. For if we were still in Original Participation, which many think is IT, we would still have far to go. But we have the gruelling task, as people who see the Entanglement, of accompanying a majority of people who are completely blind. What a privilege! I hope I don’t sound arrogant. I’d rather sound crazy, but I’m neither one of those things. I’m serious.
Now I’m not even sure if I’m making any sense. In short, I see the connection, I see the entanglement, I see science seeing it too and I’m hoping it trickles down faster than expected. Only God knows though. Patience, long suffering, loving kindness and expectant joy, these are the tools of my trade.
“The basic quality of the living unity is: to divide itself, to unite itself, to flow into the general, to remain in the specific, to transform itself, to specify itself and, like the living may make itself obvious under a thousand different circumstances, to break forth and to vanish, to solidify and to melt, to freeze and to flow, to expand and to contract. Since all of these effects occur in the same time-moment simultaneously, all and everything can happen at the same time. Arising and expiring, creating and destroying, in the same sense and the same way; therefore the specific, which is occurring, appears always as a picture and analogy of the general.”
Hey Rockers. Shari, this is all very much dancing around the stuff I am lost in as well. I also love that Goethe quote and have never seen it. This is just the kind of meander of chat that I really am needing as I am trying to pull myself through what feels like a blender of ideas this last year as my animism as well as my deep mistrust of any doctrine that makes a claim for stasis rather than blessing the imagination/spirit to return it to the same wind that gave it birth have met with a hail by particulars of my ancestry and an upending re-encounter with the Messianic in Yeshua at the same time as a undeniable need to circumvent the ordering of modernity and find the Holy in the places outside the camps and other systemitizing haunts.
I often wish we would have a zoom here for the scattered and unaligned rabble to talk wildly about these things.
I am really struggling for time and my mind a bit broken from some things in work and life tonight. I am going to try to work on my next post with some of this in mind and see if it can tangle the post into this thread and others.
I do think this idea of deleting such things is not a thing to be bothered with on this substack at least. This was all very welcome and gratefully marked as was Heather Abbey, and Graham's punching in.
I was thinking more on that article you shared and the quote from Goethe in a discussion this morning. This came to mind.
I also think he is talking about the nature of transformation, which is also about non differentiation. Nothing goes away. Nothing is lost. Only that which can be shaken. Everything else remains. In other words, the essence remains. That which was and is and is to come.
Oh my gosh, a Zoom where we could just say stuff! Please! My head feels like a blender too. I really look forward to whatever tasty milkshake comes out of yours in the next post!
Shari, thank you so much for your thoughtful and heartfelt reflections. (You don’t sound arrogant in the least, just insightful and fortunate enough to recognize it.) Can you please share the text this Goethe quote is from…it simply knocked me over.
Thanks for that. I felt like it needed to be said, but I was afraid to say it! Actually woke up this morning wondering if I should delete it :) And so you were a God send. Thank you.
I only just found this post. Thanks for your kind and good thoughts. I think some of us are finding each other on here, winding our gauzes on our wounds in similar ways. Peeking at the healing, perhaps prematurely, but sharing it, and being glad of each other's well-words.
Ok, this is exactly what I’ve been trying to articulate for a couple of weeks to myself. Thank you, thank you! (you are also ironically proving your point as you’re making it 🤣)
Thanks, Abbey. They are both revisions that finally slid into thier moment with a few changes that made them come clear for me and the matching of the moment here.
It seems as if that is part of the adventure of writing in this way. It is one of the reasons why I am enjoying it so much because it is so…organic? I’m working on a piece that I felt was missing some thing and just today it grew another limb right in front of my eyes. Other things might need to be excised and/or incubate for longer.
Yeah. At first it was tempting to believe that something more useful or potent in the work could be found by more likes, more readers, more subscriptions. But really a few handfuls of close readers for a work and its insertion in a small circle of others writing around the same ideas (whether they see you back or not) is enough to generate that writer's full spectrum I think. Even better if ideas start really cross-pollinating. That is where imagination's release range goes exponetial.
"A watcher's brow, one grotto arcs us
moon to sun, her silence bows us
ear to drum to drum, all word returning
one to One, walking barefoot,
bright upon the vow-swept floor"
brought tears to my eyes
Me too!
Gorgeous poetry. I read Caroline’s post. I have such a tortured relationship to words. I hate them, but they are all that I have most of the time. I’ve thought about writing a Substack, but I just keep thinking.....”how many more words do we need?!” I want to write poetry 4 lines long on napkins. I want my words to be pregnant with all the other words.
I am however, grateful there so many of you who don’t feel this way about words. See! Tortured.
Hey Shari. More and more I slip out of the normal either/or of individual vs. collective. In the work of Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti she harmonizes with Da Silva and others to offer a third way which she tentatively labels the metabolic. I didn't post it today but the more prose-ish piece connected to these poems mentions your words on the lambs and parts of it are infused with that gravity as well as questions picked up listening in to that Israel chat on the Grail. Once we really get how entangled we are in each other, especially when we risk any certainties and open the space to let the language between us light the world with its interactions and tensions wording becomes not individual, or even collective, but that metabolic in some modest at first (until we really begin to let it run) but very real ways.
I more and more value the substacks where quotes and allusions to other substacks begin to lose any right to say "Here is my thoughts, and mine alone."
Plus, yes to napkin poems, 4 lines long.
I look forward to that. And the idea of metabolism! I like it very much. All doing our part to keep this body alive.
I think the main sense of it is in chapter six of the second half of hospicing modernity. Also some parts of it (the Da Silva contributions are here:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/574dd51d62cd942085f12091/t/5c157d5c1ae6cf4677819e69/1544912221105/D+Ferreira+da+Silva+-+On+Difference+Without+Separability.pdf
“When nonlocality guides our imaging of the universe, difference is not a manifestation
of an unresolvable estrangement, but the expression of an elementary entanglement. That is, when the social reflects The Entangled World, sociality becomes neither the cause nor the effect of relations involving separate existants, but the uncertain condition under which everything that exists is a singular expression of each and every actual-virtual other existant.”
So many things come to mind reading this essay. Goethe first and foremost, although I have not read a single book he has written, I understand him through people like Rudolf Steiner and George MacDonald. At some point I will need to dedicate my busy hands to holding and paging through one of his books. Another is Iain McGilchrist and of course he leans heavily in the same direction. https://humanjourney.us/intercultural/iain-mcgilchrist-the-matter-with-things-review/
But another stands out to me. Owen Barfield, who also relished Steiner and therefore Goethe, for it was Goethe who baptized his imagination.
I’m so ill educated when it comes to philosophy not having studied or read any of those philosophers in the essay, but I seem to find myself standing in the midst of their thought experiments. And I want to ask them if it’s working out the way they thought it would because you see, nothing ever works out the way we think it should or could. It’s always something completely different, to steal a phrase from Monty Python. (Those geniuses!)
Barfield declares that we are in a withdrawal of participation. That is correct as far as I can tell, and there is no going back. I find this exciting. For if we were still in Original Participation, which many think is IT, we would still have far to go. But we have the gruelling task, as people who see the Entanglement, of accompanying a majority of people who are completely blind. What a privilege! I hope I don’t sound arrogant. I’d rather sound crazy, but I’m neither one of those things. I’m serious.
Now I’m not even sure if I’m making any sense. In short, I see the connection, I see the entanglement, I see science seeing it too and I’m hoping it trickles down faster than expected. Only God knows though. Patience, long suffering, loving kindness and expectant joy, these are the tools of my trade.
“The basic quality of the living unity is: to divide itself, to unite itself, to flow into the general, to remain in the specific, to transform itself, to specify itself and, like the living may make itself obvious under a thousand different circumstances, to break forth and to vanish, to solidify and to melt, to freeze and to flow, to expand and to contract. Since all of these effects occur in the same time-moment simultaneously, all and everything can happen at the same time. Arising and expiring, creating and destroying, in the same sense and the same way; therefore the specific, which is occurring, appears always as a picture and analogy of the general.”
- Goethe
Hey Rockers. Shari, this is all very much dancing around the stuff I am lost in as well. I also love that Goethe quote and have never seen it. This is just the kind of meander of chat that I really am needing as I am trying to pull myself through what feels like a blender of ideas this last year as my animism as well as my deep mistrust of any doctrine that makes a claim for stasis rather than blessing the imagination/spirit to return it to the same wind that gave it birth have met with a hail by particulars of my ancestry and an upending re-encounter with the Messianic in Yeshua at the same time as a undeniable need to circumvent the ordering of modernity and find the Holy in the places outside the camps and other systemitizing haunts.
I often wish we would have a zoom here for the scattered and unaligned rabble to talk wildly about these things.
I am really struggling for time and my mind a bit broken from some things in work and life tonight. I am going to try to work on my next post with some of this in mind and see if it can tangle the post into this thread and others.
I do think this idea of deleting such things is not a thing to be bothered with on this substack at least. This was all very welcome and gratefully marked as was Heather Abbey, and Graham's punching in.
I was thinking more on that article you shared and the quote from Goethe in a discussion this morning. This came to mind.
I also think he is talking about the nature of transformation, which is also about non differentiation. Nothing goes away. Nothing is lost. Only that which can be shaken. Everything else remains. In other words, the essence remains. That which was and is and is to come.
Oh my gosh, a Zoom where we could just say stuff! Please! My head feels like a blender too. I really look forward to whatever tasty milkshake comes out of yours in the next post!
Shari, thank you so much for your thoughtful and heartfelt reflections. (You don’t sound arrogant in the least, just insightful and fortunate enough to recognize it.) Can you please share the text this Goethe quote is from…it simply knocked me over.
Thanks for that. I felt like it needed to be said, but I was afraid to say it! Actually woke up this morning wondering if I should delete it :) And so you were a God send. Thank you.
I’m not sure exactly where that quote is from in Goethe’s works but I got it from this amazing article. https://designforsustainability.medium.com/the-tip-of-the-iceberg-goethe-s-aphorisms-on-the-theory-of-nature-and-science-ba6e12ebd5f1
Goethe is definitely someone I’d like to spend more time reading.
I only just found this post. Thanks for your kind and good thoughts. I think some of us are finding each other on here, winding our gauzes on our wounds in similar ways. Peeking at the healing, perhaps prematurely, but sharing it, and being glad of each other's well-words.
Ok, this is exactly what I’ve been trying to articulate for a couple of weeks to myself. Thank you, thank you! (you are also ironically proving your point as you’re making it 🤣)
November, captured.
Thanks, Abbey. They are both revisions that finally slid into thier moment with a few changes that made them come clear for me and the matching of the moment here.
It seems as if that is part of the adventure of writing in this way. It is one of the reasons why I am enjoying it so much because it is so…organic? I’m working on a piece that I felt was missing some thing and just today it grew another limb right in front of my eyes. Other things might need to be excised and/or incubate for longer.
Yeah. At first it was tempting to believe that something more useful or potent in the work could be found by more likes, more readers, more subscriptions. But really a few handfuls of close readers for a work and its insertion in a small circle of others writing around the same ideas (whether they see you back or not) is enough to generate that writer's full spectrum I think. Even better if ideas start really cross-pollinating. That is where imagination's release range goes exponetial.