Lately, I've been thinking a lot about meaning and how humans are meaning makers. I recognized this here in your piece when you talk about the need to attach stories to the squiggly worms. We give them meaning and then the meaning loses its freshness and becomes "calcified." Then we have to shake the stiffness out by shaking the language out. Edge space (the place where one ecology meets another and lots of stuff can grow because the space isn't quite field or forest but something in between) is a theme of mine. So the invitation, here, to sit at the limits of our language is evocative. And I need to revisit Blake!
This is exactly it! The meaning loses its freshness — but that can be terrifying to admit, because it can be so terrifying to sit in the space of uncertainty and wait. And so instead we so often cling to things that have lost their meaning. Love this insight about the ecological edge space — that definitely seems true in the ecology of stories too. I hope you do return to Blake; his whole jam was staying alive to this precise dynamic; keeping the imagination forever alive so that you don’t end up in dead and dangerous stories. Thank you for reading! x
Blue worms! Rip my racing heart from my breast and serve me naked lunch throbbing on a skewer. Punch drunk. Reeling. Ecstatic! This essay is pure magic and I am breathless. My mind has cracked asunder and I am left dancing in the dust motes of the Tao. Yes yes yes! Poetry detonates the stony ego gate and casts wide the body-soul’s polychrome communion with the depths of formless wholeness Beyond. Scattered words burst in verdant tendrils from the union in maelstrom — portent footprints of our true nature.
Serendipitously, I just happened to recently get up the gumption to finally begin (yes it took me that long) Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary — and now I can’t put it down. Just last night I reached his discussion of right and left brain hemispheric biases in ways of perceiving and being-in the world as they relate to the cultural transitions through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Romantic era and Modernism. He discusses both Blake and Shakespeare at length. So I had to pinch myself this morning when reading your fabulous essay. Have you read any of McGilchrist’s work? I would be intrigued by your thoughts.
I love what you said about mythology being the encounter with raw elemental energy—pure potential—and that we cast the encounter in the clothing of metaphor, stories, and archetypal personas in order to relate to it. That description rings true in my bones. I recently read Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity and she describes her Brazilian aboriginal culture’s view of storytelling as “worlding the world” where stories are living entities that actively participate in the world and change the world through our interactions with them. That is — stories are as much children of the raw elemental energy as we are. She juxtaposes this with what she calls our modern practice of “wording the world” where stories are objects we construct as containers to describe, analyze and control the world — the drab and hackneyed words that wall us off from the sacred. The walls of ego barring us from the garden within and all around us.
I wish I were closer to Devon — would love to see the exhibit and snap up a printed copy of your essay! Thank you for sharing your glorious work with us all!
Wow! This comment made my day — thanks so much for posting, and for reading so generously. I’m so glad you enjoyed this piece.
I love Iain McGilchrist! The Master and his Emissary has been a big influence for me. I haven’t managed to get through The Matter with Things yet, though. (Did you know that he’s on Substack now too? Started publishing a few weeks ago.)
And I keep meaning to read Hospicing Modernity. I’ve read the wonderful Dougald Hine’s thoughts about it. I do really like that phrase “worlding the world” — but something in me resists the denigration of wording the world. Words themselves are alive, and packed with SO much history and ancestry. We’d do well to remember this, I think. (But I need to read the book to fully understand the distinction she’s making.)
If you send me your address, I’d love to send you a copy of the essay booklet free of charge.
I am so excited that you are a fellow McGilchrist enthusiast! The further I delve into his work the more gobsmacked I am at how good it is. Especially his daring forays into linking patterns of hemispheric dominance with their manifestations in culture in a sort of emergent scale feedback loop. As though the brains phase-locking in one hemisphere’s pattern is a kind of genotype projecting a kind of mimetic phenotype at a higher level of abstraction, that in turn reinforces the hemispheric bias at the individual level. Almost as though this pattern spawns and is spawned by some form of egregore. The title is very suggestive too — the Master and His Emissary — hinting deliciously at themes more often associated with Gnosticism and alchemy. So the references to Blake and Shakespeare is all the more interesting.
I love what you said about words being alive! So true! Perhaps a the distinction Oliveira was drawing was in the mind-frame/mode in which they are used, especially relating to the hemispheric biases McGilchrist explores. From a left-hemispheric perspective words are inert objects—Explicit Order tokens with only utilitarian and transactional value—means of manipulation. From the right hemispheric perspective they are portals to the Implicit Order—liminal magic that awakens us to our relationship with and embodiment of the Divine Whole—means of communion. It strikes me that Nietzsche was a philologist—etymology feels like breadcrumbs leading us through the Möbius twist labyrinth towards reunion with the mysterious Ground of being. I practice Aikido and recently I have finally begun to appreciate how important Kotodama or “the spirit of Word” was to the founder’s philosophy of the practice. In Indian systems there is mantra. In the west there is Logos. To me these seem to point to a form or right hemisphere flavored resonance, entrainment and communion with the elemental energy blue worms you describe….
Thank you for the generous offer to send me a physical copy of your essay! I live on the other side of the planet and would be honored if you would allow me to cover the costs as well as support your work. I will reach out to you by email and we can work out the details.
Thank you so much for this incredibly rich comment (and sorry about the delay in responding). I'm intrigued that you mention Aikido -- I keep getting martial arts nudges at the moment. Probably something I should follow up...
And yes -- I absolutely think that different levels of perception/consciousness want to use words in different ways. I wonder though whether even the left-hemispheric attempt to reduce words to inert counters is ever fully successful. Was chatting with a friend this morning about how remarkable it is that for all that the modern experience has worked to sever us from the full, billowing infinity of the world for at least 500 years... that billowing infinity has also always been *right there*, and still is now, even after everything.
Anyway -- I'm aware I owe you an email, so will touch in over there shortly.
No need to apologize, no rush! Your reference to “the billowing infinity” is so beautiful and so true! We just need to open our “doors of perception” to be present to it. Even in our left-locked “self”-imposed exile from the Garden, I think intuitively we can feel that that invisible “kingdom” of Now calling itself through us.
You might enjoy Aikido—it’s the most intense training in sensitivity and gentleness I have ever experienced
Having recently returned from 12 days in the desert being stalked by the numinous, I'd recommend as an action item: "get thee to a wild landscape, and quickly." There's a reason Lear needed the moors - the cold wind's reality pierces through life's trappings.
Ah, thank you for this! Bloody love the desert — nothing like a good humbling by an inconceivably huge landscape. I live on a moor! Inside a national park that’s a moor. Off for a ramble in a bit — thank you for the reminder of how important this is. x
Yes! Have you listened to the Telepathy Tapes? The “spellers” speak poetically…as well, proclaimed poets feeling the call to share divine expression. Speaking to the space between us, we need to read, hear, and express universal love. 💗
I have listened to some of the Telepathy Tapes, but not all. Kept needing to stop and metabolize what I was hearing — it’s very powerful stuff. What you’ve said here reminded me of a quote from Hildegard of Bingen, which says of people who want to complete God’s works (i.e. be creative): “They can only sing the mysteries of God like a trumpet, which only returns a sound but does not function unassisted, for it is Another who breathes into it that it might give forth a sound.” To me, this is just a Christianized version of the start of The Odyssey’s “Sing in me, Muse.” x
Could it be said that English spoken 'rationally' (as in an essay, but also almost all of its usage) is talking to the world which has been ascertained to already exist, at least to the general standards of consensus reality - that is, to humans who are supposedly rational (and now AI, I guess)
Whereas poetry is the creation of (new) meaning, and so can speak not only of, but also to, souls and hearts and trees and elements and energies and gods and devils and blue worms, and anything the imagination can apprehend, and the parts of humans which correspond to these
And given the way language signals belonging to a particular group
So poetry (by which I mean any action that creates or at least opens the door for new meaning) allows us to speak with the universe - to belong to it - by participating in its creation, as we speak
Remembering that the words which flow through us our not ours
So, with what tongues might you speak to the blue worms?
(Who, I suggest, might not like being relegated to the possibility of some kooky psychedelic after-effect in order to hide or excuse your weirdness from 'normal' people. It's ok to experience things like that. I have experienced how the heavy policing of the powers of the irrational can lead us to repression and self-censorship There are a lot of edges there, because that's where all power comes from, so it has been very jealously guarded, and our world, language, ideas of reality, etc, all form a construction of strong exclusion. It can be hard to reclaim. The fear of many witch hunts still lingers in our collective body. So! Be weird and proud!)
Towards which end, have you read much Andre Breton? His prose can be magnificent. I think it's really sad that the full revolutionary heart of the Surrealist project - social revolution to liberate humanity's consciousness - is so rarely recognised. It has deep implications, and is what I immediately thought of when I read your world needs your weirdness piece. But of course it's easier to focus on clouds and melting clocks
I like that distinction — puts me in mind of Owen Barfield’s notion of active participation, which is really just a fancy phrase for imagination (in the true sense). The idea that imagination isn’t invention; it’s a way to bring forth the latent potential of the world; all the possibilities that are already there somewhere but haven’t been born yet.
And yes, point taken about cracking wise about my blue worms. I do have a pretty intimate relationship with my inner seeing, and I think talking about all this stuff without humour can be counter-productive. Makes it seem all lofty and inaccessible when it’s really just the stuff of life. But I’ll make sure to give some extra love to the imaginal to make sure that she knows my joking is affectionate, and actually kinda done for constructive reasons.
I read Nadja about 20 years ago and haven’t returned since. I should! Thank you for prompting me. And thank you as ever for reading so closely and generously. x
What an absolutely wonderful piece. A joy to listen to it at work in my van this morning.
I feel honoured to get a mention. Thank you. And I'm am thrilled that you teased us with the prospect of an essay on money.
Your blue wormy essay triggered too many references to mention. The one that seemed to want really stick around was the idea Thomas Crump expresses in his paper "Money and number: the Trojan Horse of Language" - I don't know whether or not I agree with him. He argues that the words used to denote numbers in an indigenous language will change in response to increased interaction with a dominant culture and that the agent of change is Money. Here's how he closes it out, talking about the Spanish colonisation of South America.
"The indigenous populations were able to encapsulate the ritual of the church, adapt its calendar to their own traditional ceremonial cycle and its popular theology to their own world view, and isolate the practice of religion from the mainstream of Spanish, or at the present time, world catholicism. The integrity of the local languages was hardly threatened. But the Peso succeeded where the cross failed. For it is of the nature of money to dissolve boundaries and it is difficult to conceal the uniformity of monetary institutions under the diversity of language."
Oh, hell. One more but simply because 1) Noam is a genius and 2) I think the opening paragraph might grab you and not let go.
"The tongue that only grows when you have the courage to sit out in the elements and listen, and listen, and listen, until something new swims up and asks to be plucked and put on the page." feeling so very called to this right now. Sometimes it feels lazy as a writer to not write (ie to not share all of my writing); especially about every current occurrence. But there is much noise good god, and I do not wish that others stop speaking about what they feel they should, but I myself can so easily smell the "glibness" you speak of. And it makes me want to lie under a tree and drift off into a dream, only to be awoken by a squirrel throwing nuts at me... or something. Thank you for your musings, they are always right on time.
Thanks so much for this. I love that you point out the difference between not writing and not sharing all your writing. For me personally, I think there’s so much value in showing up every day to listen, but knowing that some (if not most) of what comes is private, between me and the muse. And I love this idea of sleeping under a tree! (Though I gotta say, the listening typically feels much more humbling and hard than that, for me!) x
I’m open to exploring it more deeply which will honestly require that discomfort of not filling! There is so much comfort in fullness, at least for me. It’s the emptying/silence that’s always the struggle.
Thanks Eleanor, only one word I would shift in this whole piece, and that is the word shift. Paradigm shift sounds so sudden while some paradigms shift glacially. Journalists are too impatient for glaciers ;)
Thank you for this. That’s such a helpful correction actually, because people so often say “people have been talking about a paradigm shift since the theosophists/the Golden Dawn/the Spiritualist movement/take your pick” — and my point is, yes! I think it’s all part of one unfolding thing.
And there can be multiple paradigms overlapping and shifting at utterly different paces...I tend to be more intrigued by the layers that change very slowly...
I love this line: "It has the courage to take up residence in the place of uncertainty, listen very carefully, and try to find the right words, the true words, even if they don’t seem like much at the time." So much wisdom compressed into that. And I love your wonderful blue worms, whatever they may be!
Fantastic post Eleanor! Language is both the trap that has got us into this mess, and it is also the way out. I've been listening to a few ministers recently on the radio, and am struck by the way they weaponise words....Favourite tactic is to start their answers with So.....thus distancing themselves from the question. And I have so enjoyed the William Blake conversations, only regret is that we can't do them in the same room, it would be so good to share space with such wonderful people. And your blue worms, do they by any chance look like the Blue Meanies from The Yellow Submarine?
Thanks for reading, Brid! Always lovely to hear from you. Funny what you say about those ministers — when you said about starting a sentence with “so”, the first thing that came to mind for me was the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf, which translates “Hwaet” as “So”, less for distance and more as a sort of gathering of attention.
So glad you’ve enjoyed Blake. Looking forward to seeing you for the final one!
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about meaning and how humans are meaning makers. I recognized this here in your piece when you talk about the need to attach stories to the squiggly worms. We give them meaning and then the meaning loses its freshness and becomes "calcified." Then we have to shake the stiffness out by shaking the language out. Edge space (the place where one ecology meets another and lots of stuff can grow because the space isn't quite field or forest but something in between) is a theme of mine. So the invitation, here, to sit at the limits of our language is evocative. And I need to revisit Blake!
This is exactly it! The meaning loses its freshness — but that can be terrifying to admit, because it can be so terrifying to sit in the space of uncertainty and wait. And so instead we so often cling to things that have lost their meaning. Love this insight about the ecological edge space — that definitely seems true in the ecology of stories too. I hope you do return to Blake; his whole jam was staying alive to this precise dynamic; keeping the imagination forever alive so that you don’t end up in dead and dangerous stories. Thank you for reading! x
Yes, that space of uncertainty, sitting in it is so hard, and sometimes we have to sit in it a very long time. Thank you, again!
Blue worms! Rip my racing heart from my breast and serve me naked lunch throbbing on a skewer. Punch drunk. Reeling. Ecstatic! This essay is pure magic and I am breathless. My mind has cracked asunder and I am left dancing in the dust motes of the Tao. Yes yes yes! Poetry detonates the stony ego gate and casts wide the body-soul’s polychrome communion with the depths of formless wholeness Beyond. Scattered words burst in verdant tendrils from the union in maelstrom — portent footprints of our true nature.
Serendipitously, I just happened to recently get up the gumption to finally begin (yes it took me that long) Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary — and now I can’t put it down. Just last night I reached his discussion of right and left brain hemispheric biases in ways of perceiving and being-in the world as they relate to the cultural transitions through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Romantic era and Modernism. He discusses both Blake and Shakespeare at length. So I had to pinch myself this morning when reading your fabulous essay. Have you read any of McGilchrist’s work? I would be intrigued by your thoughts.
I love what you said about mythology being the encounter with raw elemental energy—pure potential—and that we cast the encounter in the clothing of metaphor, stories, and archetypal personas in order to relate to it. That description rings true in my bones. I recently read Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity and she describes her Brazilian aboriginal culture’s view of storytelling as “worlding the world” where stories are living entities that actively participate in the world and change the world through our interactions with them. That is — stories are as much children of the raw elemental energy as we are. She juxtaposes this with what she calls our modern practice of “wording the world” where stories are objects we construct as containers to describe, analyze and control the world — the drab and hackneyed words that wall us off from the sacred. The walls of ego barring us from the garden within and all around us.
I wish I were closer to Devon — would love to see the exhibit and snap up a printed copy of your essay! Thank you for sharing your glorious work with us all!
Wow! This comment made my day — thanks so much for posting, and for reading so generously. I’m so glad you enjoyed this piece.
I love Iain McGilchrist! The Master and his Emissary has been a big influence for me. I haven’t managed to get through The Matter with Things yet, though. (Did you know that he’s on Substack now too? Started publishing a few weeks ago.)
And I keep meaning to read Hospicing Modernity. I’ve read the wonderful Dougald Hine’s thoughts about it. I do really like that phrase “worlding the world” — but something in me resists the denigration of wording the world. Words themselves are alive, and packed with SO much history and ancestry. We’d do well to remember this, I think. (But I need to read the book to fully understand the distinction she’s making.)
If you send me your address, I’d love to send you a copy of the essay booklet free of charge.
I am so excited that you are a fellow McGilchrist enthusiast! The further I delve into his work the more gobsmacked I am at how good it is. Especially his daring forays into linking patterns of hemispheric dominance with their manifestations in culture in a sort of emergent scale feedback loop. As though the brains phase-locking in one hemisphere’s pattern is a kind of genotype projecting a kind of mimetic phenotype at a higher level of abstraction, that in turn reinforces the hemispheric bias at the individual level. Almost as though this pattern spawns and is spawned by some form of egregore. The title is very suggestive too — the Master and His Emissary — hinting deliciously at themes more often associated with Gnosticism and alchemy. So the references to Blake and Shakespeare is all the more interesting.
I love what you said about words being alive! So true! Perhaps a the distinction Oliveira was drawing was in the mind-frame/mode in which they are used, especially relating to the hemispheric biases McGilchrist explores. From a left-hemispheric perspective words are inert objects—Explicit Order tokens with only utilitarian and transactional value—means of manipulation. From the right hemispheric perspective they are portals to the Implicit Order—liminal magic that awakens us to our relationship with and embodiment of the Divine Whole—means of communion. It strikes me that Nietzsche was a philologist—etymology feels like breadcrumbs leading us through the Möbius twist labyrinth towards reunion with the mysterious Ground of being. I practice Aikido and recently I have finally begun to appreciate how important Kotodama or “the spirit of Word” was to the founder’s philosophy of the practice. In Indian systems there is mantra. In the west there is Logos. To me these seem to point to a form or right hemisphere flavored resonance, entrainment and communion with the elemental energy blue worms you describe….
Thank you for the generous offer to send me a physical copy of your essay! I live on the other side of the planet and would be honored if you would allow me to cover the costs as well as support your work. I will reach out to you by email and we can work out the details.
Thank you so much for this incredibly rich comment (and sorry about the delay in responding). I'm intrigued that you mention Aikido -- I keep getting martial arts nudges at the moment. Probably something I should follow up...
And yes -- I absolutely think that different levels of perception/consciousness want to use words in different ways. I wonder though whether even the left-hemispheric attempt to reduce words to inert counters is ever fully successful. Was chatting with a friend this morning about how remarkable it is that for all that the modern experience has worked to sever us from the full, billowing infinity of the world for at least 500 years... that billowing infinity has also always been *right there*, and still is now, even after everything.
Anyway -- I'm aware I owe you an email, so will touch in over there shortly.
No need to apologize, no rush! Your reference to “the billowing infinity” is so beautiful and so true! We just need to open our “doors of perception” to be present to it. Even in our left-locked “self”-imposed exile from the Garden, I think intuitively we can feel that that invisible “kingdom” of Now calling itself through us.
You might enjoy Aikido—it’s the most intense training in sensitivity and gentleness I have ever experienced
Having recently returned from 12 days in the desert being stalked by the numinous, I'd recommend as an action item: "get thee to a wild landscape, and quickly." There's a reason Lear needed the moors - the cold wind's reality pierces through life's trappings.
Thanks for these explorations.
Ah, thank you for this! Bloody love the desert — nothing like a good humbling by an inconceivably huge landscape. I live on a moor! Inside a national park that’s a moor. Off for a ramble in a bit — thank you for the reminder of how important this is. x
This is so good I had to read it twice. I have a glimmer if understanding. Thank you for putting these ideas across so understandably.
What a lovely comment. Thank you so much for reading so generously. Glad this sparked something for you. x
Yes! Have you listened to the Telepathy Tapes? The “spellers” speak poetically…as well, proclaimed poets feeling the call to share divine expression. Speaking to the space between us, we need to read, hear, and express universal love. 💗
I have listened to some of the Telepathy Tapes, but not all. Kept needing to stop and metabolize what I was hearing — it’s very powerful stuff. What you’ve said here reminded me of a quote from Hildegard of Bingen, which says of people who want to complete God’s works (i.e. be creative): “They can only sing the mysteries of God like a trumpet, which only returns a sound but does not function unassisted, for it is Another who breathes into it that it might give forth a sound.” To me, this is just a Christianized version of the start of The Odyssey’s “Sing in me, Muse.” x
Could it be said that English spoken 'rationally' (as in an essay, but also almost all of its usage) is talking to the world which has been ascertained to already exist, at least to the general standards of consensus reality - that is, to humans who are supposedly rational (and now AI, I guess)
Whereas poetry is the creation of (new) meaning, and so can speak not only of, but also to, souls and hearts and trees and elements and energies and gods and devils and blue worms, and anything the imagination can apprehend, and the parts of humans which correspond to these
And given the way language signals belonging to a particular group
So poetry (by which I mean any action that creates or at least opens the door for new meaning) allows us to speak with the universe - to belong to it - by participating in its creation, as we speak
Remembering that the words which flow through us our not ours
So, with what tongues might you speak to the blue worms?
(Who, I suggest, might not like being relegated to the possibility of some kooky psychedelic after-effect in order to hide or excuse your weirdness from 'normal' people. It's ok to experience things like that. I have experienced how the heavy policing of the powers of the irrational can lead us to repression and self-censorship There are a lot of edges there, because that's where all power comes from, so it has been very jealously guarded, and our world, language, ideas of reality, etc, all form a construction of strong exclusion. It can be hard to reclaim. The fear of many witch hunts still lingers in our collective body. So! Be weird and proud!)
Towards which end, have you read much Andre Breton? His prose can be magnificent. I think it's really sad that the full revolutionary heart of the Surrealist project - social revolution to liberate humanity's consciousness - is so rarely recognised. It has deep implications, and is what I immediately thought of when I read your world needs your weirdness piece. But of course it's easier to focus on clouds and melting clocks
I like that distinction — puts me in mind of Owen Barfield’s notion of active participation, which is really just a fancy phrase for imagination (in the true sense). The idea that imagination isn’t invention; it’s a way to bring forth the latent potential of the world; all the possibilities that are already there somewhere but haven’t been born yet.
And yes, point taken about cracking wise about my blue worms. I do have a pretty intimate relationship with my inner seeing, and I think talking about all this stuff without humour can be counter-productive. Makes it seem all lofty and inaccessible when it’s really just the stuff of life. But I’ll make sure to give some extra love to the imaginal to make sure that she knows my joking is affectionate, and actually kinda done for constructive reasons.
I read Nadja about 20 years ago and haven’t returned since. I should! Thank you for prompting me. And thank you as ever for reading so closely and generously. x
Like the writing you critique, your essay also creates the same vacuum that you admire. It’s fascinating to sense that incendiary vacuum! Great essay!
What a lovely thing to say. Thank you so much. Really glad you enjoyed reading this.
What an absolutely wonderful piece. A joy to listen to it at work in my van this morning.
I feel honoured to get a mention. Thank you. And I'm am thrilled that you teased us with the prospect of an essay on money.
Your blue wormy essay triggered too many references to mention. The one that seemed to want really stick around was the idea Thomas Crump expresses in his paper "Money and number: the Trojan Horse of Language" - I don't know whether or not I agree with him. He argues that the words used to denote numbers in an indigenous language will change in response to increased interaction with a dominant culture and that the agent of change is Money. Here's how he closes it out, talking about the Spanish colonisation of South America.
"The indigenous populations were able to encapsulate the ritual of the church, adapt its calendar to their own traditional ceremonial cycle and its popular theology to their own world view, and isolate the practice of religion from the mainstream of Spanish, or at the present time, world catholicism. The integrity of the local languages was hardly threatened. But the Peso succeeded where the cross failed. For it is of the nature of money to dissolve boundaries and it is difficult to conceal the uniformity of monetary institutions under the diversity of language."
Oh, hell. One more but simply because 1) Noam is a genius and 2) I think the opening paragraph might grab you and not let go.
https://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2015/08/a-religion-of-unbelief.html
Thank you, Ellie! Jon Xx
Throughly enjoyed reading this today! Fascinating insights....🥰
Thank you so much for reading!
Brilliant! You've renewed my faith in humans today.
Ah, what a lovely thing to say. Thanks for reading. xx
"The tongue that only grows when you have the courage to sit out in the elements and listen, and listen, and listen, until something new swims up and asks to be plucked and put on the page." feeling so very called to this right now. Sometimes it feels lazy as a writer to not write (ie to not share all of my writing); especially about every current occurrence. But there is much noise good god, and I do not wish that others stop speaking about what they feel they should, but I myself can so easily smell the "glibness" you speak of. And it makes me want to lie under a tree and drift off into a dream, only to be awoken by a squirrel throwing nuts at me... or something. Thank you for your musings, they are always right on time.
Thanks so much for this. I love that you point out the difference between not writing and not sharing all your writing. For me personally, I think there’s so much value in showing up every day to listen, but knowing that some (if not most) of what comes is private, between me and the muse. And I love this idea of sleeping under a tree! (Though I gotta say, the listening typically feels much more humbling and hard than that, for me!) x
I’m open to exploring it more deeply which will honestly require that discomfort of not filling! There is so much comfort in fullness, at least for me. It’s the emptying/silence that’s always the struggle.
Thanks Eleanor, only one word I would shift in this whole piece, and that is the word shift. Paradigm shift sounds so sudden while some paradigms shift glacially. Journalists are too impatient for glaciers ;)
Thank you for this. That’s such a helpful correction actually, because people so often say “people have been talking about a paradigm shift since the theosophists/the Golden Dawn/the Spiritualist movement/take your pick” — and my point is, yes! I think it’s all part of one unfolding thing.
And there can be multiple paradigms overlapping and shifting at utterly different paces...I tend to be more intrigued by the layers that change very slowly...
I love this line: "It has the courage to take up residence in the place of uncertainty, listen very carefully, and try to find the right words, the true words, even if they don’t seem like much at the time." So much wisdom compressed into that. And I love your wonderful blue worms, whatever they may be!
Thanks for reading, lovely Nanette! Always happy to see your name. x
Fantastic post Eleanor! Language is both the trap that has got us into this mess, and it is also the way out. I've been listening to a few ministers recently on the radio, and am struck by the way they weaponise words....Favourite tactic is to start their answers with So.....thus distancing themselves from the question. And I have so enjoyed the William Blake conversations, only regret is that we can't do them in the same room, it would be so good to share space with such wonderful people. And your blue worms, do they by any chance look like the Blue Meanies from The Yellow Submarine?
Thanks for reading, Brid! Always lovely to hear from you. Funny what you say about those ministers — when you said about starting a sentence with “so”, the first thing that came to mind for me was the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf, which translates “Hwaet” as “So”, less for distance and more as a sort of gathering of attention.
So glad you’ve enjoyed Blake. Looking forward to seeing you for the final one!