How astonishing to remember that nothing has inherent color, that color is not a property of objects but of the light that falls upon them, reflected back. So too with the light of the mind — it is attention that gives the world its vibrancy, its kaleidoscopic beauty. The quality of attention we pay something or someone is the measure of our love. And because every littlest thing is, as John Muir observed, “hitched to everything else in the universe,” when we pay generous and unalloyed attention to anything, we are learning to love everything; we are learning that all around and within this world there is another, numinous and resinous with wonder, shimmering with a sense of the miraculous. (Maria Popova, The Marginalian)
Sometimes I avoid reading Maria Popova’s weekly digest in my inbox every Sunday morning. She burdens and blesses my soul with a creative yearning. Her posts bend my will to the desire of words to be written and stories to be told, while my inner disciplinarian reminds me of all that I ought to be doing: the deadlines I’ve missed again, the emails I haven’t answered, the overflowing wash basket. I have to push aside the urge to write for the joy of writing, to focus on more mundane and productive tasks.
But sometimes the urge won’t let me go. Today, the first day after a bank holiday weekend, there’s nothing in the diary. I resolve to make good use of the time — “good” in this case meaning productive — but I’ve already spent the first half hour on Twitter/Black Cross, getting agitated and being provocative. Social media is irresistible when the alternative is tedious productivity.
I check the tide times before I get up. There’s a very high tide late morning. I can go down to the beach and watch when the dramatic inflow begins about three hours before high tide. I succumb to the temptation. It’s beautifully calm, a good day for swimming, but there’s been another sewage spill — there’s a circle in Dante’s hell for the shareholders and CEOs of Britain’s privatised water companies. I content myself with watching the rippling waves creeping towards my feet as I retreat from the disappearing sandbank I’ve been standing on.
Last week, my five year old granddaughter and I spent an hour on the beach at sunset. She lightens my spirit with her freedom and joy. The sea restores in me a sense of childlike delight in that world within a world that is “numinous and resinous with wonder, shimmering with a sense of the miraculous”.
As I play with the incoming tide, I listen to Krista Tippett’s On Being interview with Matthew Sanford, who was paralysed from the neck down in a car accident that killed his father and his sister when he was thirteen. He speaks of the healing power of yoga and learning to be attentive to “the body’s grace”. He describes how our bodies are woven out of space and “sinewy silence”, out of subliminal rhythms and movements beyond consciousness, feeling, and control. He says to become conscious of our own bodies is to become more compassionate. We could not fight wars if we were more conscious of living through our bodies. Rather than lamenting the body’s weaknesses and frailties, its sufferings and struggles (of which he has known an abundant excess), he interprets these as the body’s commitment to healing and life: “Your body, for as long as it possibly can, will be faithful to living. That’s what it does. … It’s moving towards living, for as long as it possibly can.”
It’s hard, though, for a writer to live in the body, to fully inhabit the present and be alive to the here and now, for we are always telling stories in our heads. This is a primordial gift, and sometimes it feels like a curse: the compulsion to paint the world with words, and the yearning to share those words, those stories, with others.
After the sea has swallowed the sandbanks, I climb the dunes and try to silence the agitated inner voice telling me to hurry home and start work. I sit on top of the highest dune and watch the world in microcosm, until the wonder ripples through me like the incoming tide. But even then I’m telling a story, planning the post I’ll write when I get home, before I start work. It occurs to me that there are at least three layers to consciousness, rising and falling with the rhythms of thought.
There’s the time-bound ordinariness of the mind in motion, wrestling with issues, making plans, creating flurries of anxiety or hope, shame or assurance, trying to focus on the task in hand.
Then there’s this, sitting on the dunes, letting go, being at rest until the sinewy silence begins to speak, and the quietened soul becomes limpid enough to let in the world of wonders. See how the dewdrops cling to each blade of grass and shrink gradually to nothingness in the rising sun. See the tiny plant poking its hopeful head through the sand, knowing in the essence of its being that winter is over and new life is beginning. See the fly that lands on my foot and makes it a playground. See the withered skin of my own ageing body, adapting and preserving my life in all its wondrous stages and seasons.
In these recent attempts at attentiveness, I’ve become conscious of the miraculous abundance of life within which we are immersed. Suddenly, I see that what I have in common with everything that lives is more uniting than anything that separates me from the rest of creation. Life. In every blade of grass and tiny wildflower. Every bird and butterfly. Every bug and beetle. All things great and small. With all the genius of the human species, with our vast capacity for creativity and destructiveness, altruism and violence, we cannot create life. No laboratory in the world can create a single living blade of grass out of nothing. No technology can breathe life into the artefact. No intelligence can cross the mysterious bridge that leads from artifice to life.
But soon the third level of consciousness is rising, and attentiveness is filtered through the story I want to tell — this story I’m telling. I set the camera on my phone to macro and capture every wondrous detail so that I can share it. Is this a distraction, or is it a deeper attentiveness? I am a creature in a living world, but what distinguishes my species is the capacity for language woven out of memory and imagination, this time-travelling gift (or is it a curse?) that offers us a finite freedom from necessity and instinct. This breaking free from the here and now into imagined worlds segues into intellectual rumination.
I have a philosopher friend who likes to do thought experiments, including the one that asks you to imagine a clone of someone you love who has died. If the clone were identical in every discernable way, if it were impossible to tell the difference between the deceased beloved and the clone, wouldn’t you just accept the clone as a substitute? An atheist rationalist, he wants me to give a rational explanation for my denial, but I can’t. There is something about life itself that is the ultimate other, so easily destroyed, so impossible to create. It is the given of our existence, and it flows into us and out of us on the liquidity of love. It’s love that makes us vulnerable. It’s love that whispers to us from every petal of every flower, from every dewdrop hanging from every blade of grass, from every child dying in the rubble and ruin of war. It’s the body’s dedication to life that gives rise to every sorrow and grief, every anguish and loss. I ask myself, is it possible to truly love the inanimate object? We might treasure it and depend upon it, but can we love it? Medieval philosophers and theologians believed that every living being has a soul. The animus is what animates each life according to its form. To be ensouled is to be woven into the living world in all its mystery, in all its givenness.
When I walk on the beach, I reflect on how each sea shell is a memorial, the legacy of a life repeated in thousands of manifestations of beauty and no two are ever the same. I take photographs of dead birds and fish because they are beautiful in their fragility and sorrow. This morning, the skeleton of a fish bears witness to the generosity of the dead creature, picked clean by gulls and gannets, giving its flesh that others might live, swaying in the rhythms of the incoming tide. The body’s grace continues after death.
Clambering down the dunes, homeward bound at last, I’m giddy with the minutiae of life all around. A tiny snail is struggling through a mound of sand. I pick it up and rinse it clean in a puddle, then watch with joy as it tentatively put out its tiny horns and makes its way across the grassy verge. Life! We cannot create it, but sometimes we can preserve it. And every living being is my soul mate.