On Speaking Low

 

Entering a New Year, with Janus looking forward and back, to landscapes familiar and changed. Confronting stresses internal and external: climate change, contagion, conflict, confusion. Worn mentality, emotions of grief and loss. Escape attempts: entire populations in denial. Swinging out.

Talking to yourself is said to be a sign of insanity. Yet we talk to ourselves all the time, if only silently. Much of this conversation is critical; much of our memory is regret. This negative voice is actually subtraction. Designed to keep us safe. Subtracting dangers. Recalling risks, provoking examples where things went wrong. The superstition of avoiding praise that might attract misfortune. Yet misfortune is.

Other tones are available, attainable. Think of the unfettered approval given a child who is learning to walk. Falling comes with the world. The voice is encouraging, sure we can do it. We can’t save ourselves (Christ has already done that) but we won’t do nothing. We can sympathise with our plight. Take responsibility for our timing. Fight our corner. Give ourselves every chance. Speak low and easy into our succession of moments, as a warm travelling companion. That’s my New Year’s Resolution: speak low, speak love, start at home.

On Christmas Present

 

Advent: a season of repentance. For beginners, we could look at greed. Greed of Empire. Personal greed. Even greed of space.

It’s famously more blessed to give than to receive, and charity’s a word of bad repute. Why? What’s the relationship between justice and moderation? How to avoid ostentation? Generosity depends on having. What’s the cost to the receiver? What’s taken away? What obligation purveyed? What conditional love displayed? Is this gift really necessary?

Many motivations and intentions. You can give time, strength and attention. Everybody wants your attention, can’t get enough. Much of it in grievous situations. Grief on the move. And harmony, the resolution of discord, that must be led back over and over, in progressions.

The obligation is not to the receiver, but the giver. It will test your values. There’s no top to the pile of causes stacking up on my desk, appealing for money and support. What’s the relationship between courage and wisdom?  How best to relieve suffering? Or nourish, or inspire? Which most appropriate decisions can you make, knowing the others have a right to your help? (As you to theirs.) Christmas present is love for me and thee and they.

On the Temple

 

I’ve seen a warehouse when the consignment has shipped: swept bare, not a nail or speck of dust remains. If the body is a temple, as the Apostle says, so also the body’s mind.  You don’t allow heaps of rubbish lying around a temple, so less the body and even less the mind.

Piles of procrastination. Hoards of hurts. Caches of comparisons. Operas of offence. Bales of brawls and dramatic cavorting. Menageries of judgement. Cellars of self-congratulation.

Illness and mourning shock the body whether you’re consciously aware or not: energy leaks away like water. Change the stowage. Find chapels of healing; encompassed griefs; cloistered regrets swathed in prayers of humility.

What to bring to this space once you’ve removed the lumber? Trousseaux of thankfulness, gardens of good will, coffers of kindness. Pure intentions. Troves of tender regard. Gatherings of flowers, scripture, literature, art. Music, language of angels. Vast stores of memories. Many things are quicker to dismantle than build up. That accounts for gallons of slowness and tonnes of patience. Treasuries of mercy and lovingkindness.

‘We cannot know what God is, but rather what God is not’. Remotion, not names. No nail nor speck of dust remains.

On Mistakes

 

You only get one chance with most things, so you might as well enter into the field of your mistakes. Mistakes are your loyal friend; they will never leave you.

Some mistakes are long-lasting. It actually takes a long time to commit them. A thesis written on the wrong topic; a dream job becomes a nightmare; a cult fails to deliver your salvation. Some mistakes can’t be avoided: you can’t take everything. (A mistake is not a take). You may miss a take due to standing where you are, or to what has standing here and there. And the unmistaken life doesn’t last. Always new realms of mistakes to be explored. Mistake upon mistake compounds understanding.

Then you might remember the mistakes of others. Bearing grudges for half a lifetime over a hasty word, yourself a different person then. Twin mistakes, born at the same time. Forgiving as an act of the will; forgetting harder still. (A mistake is not a crime).

Then the mistake of taking yourself seriously; you’re often more comedy than drama. When others mistake you, “ya gotta love ‘em”. You think you’re better than them? Not so. When you make mistakes, you gotta love you, too.

On Secret Worlds

 

Can a secret be something concealed, intended to be unseen; esoteric, known only to the magic few; or at the same time widely known, promulgated, a widely cast net? The secrets of the body, for example. A deadly virus, a pestilence, mutating silently, hidden within, passing opaque from one to another, enigmatic yet evident in its effects.

There are many secret worlds: natural, social, contrived or deployed in support of a wider project of control. Conspiracy theories provide alternative explanations for what we observe to be going on: their charm lies in having the good oil, making someone a benefactor sharing the real story. Bonding with a listener looking for simplicity, agreeing with existing fears. We like simple. Complex makes us feel bad. Reality might be making us feel bad already.

There’s the secret world of intelligence, where code and espionage find threats and secure safety yet whose failures bring down nations. Of disinformation, where the wide net catches whole cohorts of lemmings going over the cliff of anti-vaccination, for example. Of religious fanaticism, where Jesus is sold: a commodity to save you from being yourself and from all worldly disasters. Not realising that you’re already saved. By the mystery.

On Breathing

 

I see, here in the second winter of the world’s war over breath, (a scarce resource; needful to life), fighting a determined pestilence the century presents us with the theme and crisis of breathing. Who breathes? And who does not? George Floyd can’t breathe because the police are pressing on his neck. (Breathing as racial privilege). His words become a manifesto for the signs of the times. Care homes become breathless as disease is carried from place to place, aged to aged. Miner’s lungs blacken. (Breathing as victim of government neglect). The earth chokes on carbon while its green lungs, the forests, burn. (Breathing as spoil of consumption and greed.)

Bata, who had barely survived cancer, spoke of approaching death: “Every breath is precious.” Our breaths are limited in number. What flows through the channels of the breath? Air; anything else is poison. What floats upon the breath? Alcohol, infection, conspiracy theories, lies?  Blessing, compassion, acceptance, love? Good news, or frightful influences?

When the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, was this the first breath of wind giving life to everything, even rocks and trees? The world’s health. Save your breath.

 

On Acts and Facts

Facts resemble acts in that something actually has been done. The sophistication of theatricality can prevent this understanding. We think we’re superior, having the truth. Is truth whatever people can be led to believe? Or whatever the big man says it is? Is it the result of an equation? Or something studied under a microscope? Once enacted, do facts remain the same?

On certain roads, I seem to travel through time. Even where trees and buildings have gone, replaced by blocks of other meaning, I feel their hidden presence. As on a ship, floating away, leaving behind acts of the past captured in these places. With them float my errors, strifes, and pleasures, and every word with its fact-making power, falling helplessly into the past. A fact can’t be altered, but what it means to you isn’t what it meant to me. Deaths and births reshape the casting: seeing life whole changes the emphasis. Consequences reveal themselves anew. Facts may be prisoners to mutable memory.  

We’re placed in a world of endless transmutations, swirling among desire and destruction. Be a little easier on yourself. God alone is eternal, and you are not in any way a god. 

On Your Ideal Age

 

When will you feel valued? Would you be a child again, happy and cared for? (Or weak and controlled?) In your teens, with adventures and potential? (Or pressured and confused?) The twenties, newly adult, beautiful and powerful? (Or unstable, insecure, just getting there?) Surely the thirties are a worldly ideal: organised, healthy, forging ahead? (Or overwhelmed with family, work, finances?) You may never feel worse about your age than turning forty, though you might have half your life before you. Then aging: you’ve collected a wardrobe of sins, errors and things you could have handled better, but you now know a trap when you see one. You might have stellar grandchildren. You might begin to understand your art. The culture of commerce specifies each age, but you don’t lose value as you grow closer to death. I knew a girl who would unexpectedly die at fifteen: every moment she shared beauty and treasure. I met a priest who, in his nineties, heard confession and gave absolution with grace and kindness. Absolute value. You are a soul for whom Christ died. Beautiful and powerful. Beauty is given by the light in which you stand.

On Kindness

 

What do you want to see when you look at your life? If handed a difficult assignment, how did you acquit it? Victories, losses, festivals and tragedies engage you personally. But the colour of events comes from the presence or absence of kindness. Not only benevolence, and the willingness to answer need, kindness can be synonymous with humanity. ‘A real human being’ is distinguished by kindness.

Kindness wishes good for others, but we need to be careful. The doing of good must be good on their terms. Saving souls, for example, can be cruel, with a long history. You can’t use assumptions, nor expectations. Less can be controlled than we would prefer to see.

How can we grow in kindness? Like any other practice it must become a priority. Other things come second. Growth in any useful part of character is only step by step: seeking kindly moments. Slowing down. Doing no harm. Being prepared for teaching when finally understanding you know nothing at all. Putting it all in the frame, from beginning to end.

 Kindness is related to justice; it gives a place or chance to belong. In all humanity, all nature, all salvation.

On the Active and the Contemplative Life

 

You might spend time reading, thinking and feeling. Others are more active: walking, running, talking and sharing. You could be thinking about your feelings or feeling about your thinkings. This takes up a lot of space. (You could be listening to music). You might be solving it by walking, running into nature, speaking into others. (You could be making music). You should be making mistakes, or differences.

Activity most likely intends accomplishment. Do things have to be finished to be worthwhile? Or are many actions as cousins to the arts, which revise, extend and refine continually?  Passivity perhaps absorbs. An intellectual understanding is not understanding; you can talk yourself into anything. Or is what is passively absorbed transformed: by alchemy, philosophy, chemistry, into knowingness or wisdom?

On being asked “How did you feel about this?” one who replies “I felt I had to do something about it” is living the active life. The test then is what you do. One who answers, “I felt I should study it” is contemplating. The test then is what you inspire in others.

Act contemplatively; contemplate actively. What matters is the end you have in mind. This will situate your direction, and your meditation.

On Humility

You can only do what you can do, at any given time. To take the blame is actually a form of spiritual pride. What you can do will often lead to trouble: to suffering, as Buddhists say. All actions have causes and conditions attending them. But the past is becoming more populated, taking energy from the future, apparent only in silhouette.

Politics, which is the matter of the city —more lately the nation, or latterly the world — is crossed by ancient hierarchies curated by modern fears. Is innocence the same as ignorance? Is ignorance the same as guilt? When you’re innocent you’re harmless, but ignorance is typically harmful. And the foolish are lost with the wise. When the matter of the world is harmful, is anyone innocent? Lack of knowledge isn’t lack of harm: quite the contrary. The Biblical nations were empires and cultures of dominance led by Victory, goddess of triumph and glory. She is, however, accompanied by slavery and desolation; it all depends on who you’re talking to. You can only do what you can do, and do it without motivation. Justice is the virtue that gives back to everything that which belongs to it. 

On Looking Again

 

What are you doing, and why are you doing it? Where have you been, and where are you going? You sure you want to go there? Who were you with, and what were they after? Look again.

Looking at this dinner, which seems so small: if you had anorexia, it would look huge. Could you see differently? It might be just the right size. You could apply this to other sizes, too. Too is in fact the problem. Too short, too tall, too round or straight. Too old, or too little. For what cause? I was asked by a poll what kind of life I’d want. Their choice. Adventurous, exciting; secure, taken care of; well-rewarded, important; family first; prosperous, having everything. I said I want an interesting life, but that wasn’t on their list. You couldn’t choose compassion, art, friendship, or contemplation. Look again.

It’s a mystical work to look from differing perspectives. Turn a person or event around like a sculpture in your mind. Turn whole years around. Turn around what you’re doing, how and why. Look at back and front, left and right, above, below. Find a strange point of view. Then do something new.