Facebook posts can be deceptive. We share what we want the world to see of our own lives, and what we have permission to share from the lives of others. But these flattened, one-dimensional stories mask so much of life’s meaning. Here is a reflection that tries to express what churns beneath the surface of those happy holiday snapshots I share. The beauty is real, as are the joy and the love of times together. But that’s never the whole story, is it? Neither is this, but it lets the shadows come out to dance.
The colour of heather is a sound that has no name. The sound of the babbling brook is a colour whose name has been lost to us. If nothing else, I should make use of this time of solitude and reflection to write a few poems. But the poems hide in stubborn resistance to my desire. The guilty feeling that time must be spent in useful ways is a restless itch in my soul. Josef Pieper, in his book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, helps me to understand that this is how the ideology of productivity enslaves us:
Leisure is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality: only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear. Silence, as it is used in this context, does not mean “dumbness” or “noiselessness”; it means more nearly that the soul’s power to “answer” to the reality of the world is left undisturbed. For leisure is a receptive attitude of mind, a contemplative attitude, and it is not only the occasion but also the capacity for steeping oneself in the whole of creation. (p. 46)
Nothingness. Wordlessness. Emptiness. These too have their meanings, hiding in that elusive realm together with the sound of heather and the colour of running water.
A Facebook friend reposted a collection of quotes from Albert Einstein—thank you, Therese Craine Bertsch. These wise words comfort me, because they tell me I’m not alone, I’m not a stranger in the strangeness of the universe.
The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why. (Einstein)
(I worry about repeating quotes whose source I haven’t checked, but I’ll take the risk. Even if Einstein didn’t say it, somebody did.)
Nature surges up all around me in these Scottish hills—colours, sounds, smells, sights, melting and flowing, alien and other.
Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. Matter is spirit reduced to point of visibility. There is no matter. (Einstein)
I wonder at what point we humans started to be denatured, separated from all of nature including our own, so that our very existence has become the greatest threat to our survival. Maybe it all began in that imagined Eden, when a great wound appeared in the cosmos and consciousness broke free of necessity, when imagination and memory, dread and desire, leaked from some mysterious source into the evolving ape that would henceforth seek to defy death by becoming a god. With the apprehension of death comes the knowledge of evil, and we find ourselves exiled in a technocratic wilderness in our flight from fear and death.
Perfect love casteth out fear, but that is because perfect love embraces loss and mourning, sorrow and grief, not as a price to be paid but as the dark gift love offers. Have we forgotten how to receive the crucifying gift?
I use a chemical toilet, carefully gather my litter, preserve my supply of water, sit in silent attentiveness, stretch out the fingertips of my imagination to touch the untouchable, expose the skin of my soul to feel the oneness of all, but thoughts, worries, sorrows, intrude.
Vibrations of love and sorrow ripple outwards through creation towards the limitless horizon, like the ripples my body sent skimming across the mirror-smooth surface of the loch I swam in yesterday.
Nature mourns the passing of the summer, feels the Midas kiss of autumn on her skin, senses the skeletal approach of winter rattling down the valleys and through the treetops. She doesn’t run or hide. She opens herself to the dark gift in all its changing seasons, knowing that these are the birthings, dyings, and risings of love.
A human being experiences herself, her thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. (Einstein, slightly modified)
The upward straining of desire is common to every created being, reaching in inconsolable yearning towards the illimitable otherness of life itself. The pine trees stretch their fingers to the sky, the tall sway of willowherb creates pink whispers of desire amidst the bracken, spikes of heather cluster in hazy lilac longing. Half-remembered lyrics from the songs of my Scottish colonial childhood wisp through me. The heather on the hill. Brigadoon. The vanishing world of an imagined home that lives in me through stories, songs, and memories, through the ancestral DNA in my bloodstream. The Welsh have an untranslatable word for it. Hiraeth. Is this what holds us together in being—this restless, insatiable desire for a home, for a sense of permanence and belonging, bleeding an eternal longing into the fabric of the world?
When something vibrates, the electrons of the entire universe resonate with it. Everything is connected. The greatest tragedy of human existence is the illusion of separateness. (Einstein)
I have the mind of an adventurer and the heart of a coward. I’ve come alone to this lonely place to make peace with my ghosts, not in a tent but in a motorhome with all my comforts around me. Night approaches and gathers up the contours of the day, leaving only the looming darkness of the forest and the vastness of the sky.
The murmuring silence engulfs me. I hear but can’t see the brook swirling over her rocky groove to tumble down to the deep, dark loch. The rain drums on the roof and splatters the windows so that I fear storms and howling winds building to a crescendo. The news tells of fires sweeping in uncontrollable rage through tinder-dry forests, consuming bodies, homes, lives. I console myself with one less thing to worry about through these lonely hours, in this rain-sodden landscape. At least there won’t be a forest fire.
We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music. (Einstein)
But we are combustible, easily profaned, the strings and fibres of our being threaded through with real and imagined fears that so easily put us out of tune.
Outside, down the tunnel of the deep dark track, I see a strange glow—a distant whiteness that morphs and ripples as I watch. It could be a car, but there is no noise and no headlights separating and differentiating themselves as they approach. Besides, this is a one-way forest track. Why would a car be driving down it the wrong way at nearly midnight? Maybe it’s a person walking with a torch. But why, if they mean no harm, would they be walking so late in this desolate place? Do they mean harm? Is the light coming closer? It’s impossible to tell.
I get up and make cocoa, because that is what one does on sleepless nights. I seek an infantile comfort associated with a warm milky drink and a gentle lullaby. My low-energy lights signal my presence as I move about, casting strange shadows. The who or the what in the shimmering haze will know I am here. I gaze into the mysterious glow, and wonder if it’s a UFO.
I snuggle darkly in bed and listen to the Desert Island Discs archive on my phone, thankful that this wild adventure is less wild than it might have been without any signal. This BBC archive spools through my dreams on restless nights—the souls of strangers exposed in the music they choose. When our own stories become too heavy to bear, there is comfort in hearing other people tell their stories and knowing that we are not alone in the sad music of our souls.
Everything is determined, every beginning and ending, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper. (Einstein)
The midges. The stars. The trees. Me. Dancing and dreaming in darkness. So small amidst it all. Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Where is the way to the home of light?”
I try not to sink down into the yearning, the broken fragments, the bits of me that are cracking and buckling because love hurts too much. Better to think about UFOs and torchlight in the night than those sorrows stretching out their fingertips towards a receding source of consolation.
I finish my cocoa and drift in and out of sleep, with the voices from the radio weaving themselves into my dreams, reminding me that love’s sorrow is as natural as rain on the rooftop and water in the stream, as haunting as ghosts that morph into light and haunt our nights.
Wide awake again, I remember meeting a group of young people when I was walking down the forested tunnel of the track, a pine-scented delight in the afternoon light. Were they camping, I asked. Yes, they were doing a Duke of Edinburgh Award. Cowering in darkness, I remind myself that young people staying up late would cast torchlit shadows in the forest. They would look like ghosts, or UFOs.
Malawian poet Jack Mapanje is telling Sue Lawley about his imprisonment and exile under the dictatorship of President Hastings Banda. Jack Mapanje is older than me, but we grew up on either side of the great colonial divide, in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. What one track would he take to the desert island? He chooses Gounod’s Ave Maria, his voice choking because that’s what love does. Sometimes it gives us songs to sing. Sometimes it chokes us. Mostly it does both.
I’m not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. (Einstein)
I check out of the window. All is quiet and dark. The rain has stopped. The light has disappeared.
The music wraps its arms around me. I snuggle close and listen to the sacred lullaby, consoled in the knowledge that mine is not the only maternal heart to beat and bleed with the music of love.