Yule and the Moon of New Beginnings

Wednesday gratefuls: Luke and Leo. Snowpack Pizzeria. Safeway pickup. Sheetpan meals. Climate change. Being a Jew, a son of Avram and Sarai. The Shema. The Far Right. Democratic socialism. The whole, wide world. Everywhere and everyone. The blessing and grace of the one. This darkness. This light.  Purpose. Meaning. Love. Joy. Compassion. Angst.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Ninth Wave

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei    Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress

Week Kavannah:  Yirah.    Radical amazement, awe.

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs.  Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”  ― Howard Thurman

Becoming a metaPhysician

One brief shining: Natalie sent a video of Shadow crossing her threshold with no hesitation, tail up, ready to sit with the other dogs for her come in the house treat, then running upstairs with the other four, headed off to bed, in her third week away from home, away from me. An ache in my heart.

I suppose most of us, if we felt so inclined, could document the thousand doubts our mind is heir to. I know that.  I’ve shared mine the last couple of days. So here’s another vantage point, a perspectival shift.

The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead warns us against what he calls fallacies of misplaced concreteness. That is, taking an idea and removing it from its context as if it were a thing sui generis. For example, imagining that there is such a thing as intelligence, justice, love instead of understanding that they are all part of a process of ongoing life, embedded in persons and situations and never existing in any other sense.

So when I place my finger on the doubts, the fears, the weariness and conclude from that I am melancholic or even depressed, I commit just such a fallacy. Yes, those doubts, fears, and weariness are part of me, yes. The key word in that sentence being part. Over the last couple of days I’ve obscured-through a fallacy of misplaced concreteness-my whole self. Imagining that the map I’ve written with those words is the true territory of my soul.

It is not. As Whitman wrote, I am many, I contain multitudes. I am no more explained by doubts and fears than I am by my knowledge and compassion. Probably less so. Why? Because the doubts and fears are more like flotsam and jetsam in the ocean of my Self. Sometimes certain currents swirl around, collect them, force them to the shore, to consciousness.

Oh, yes, I am these, too. No, wait. They are all I am. I cannot see beyond them. Never ever true.

Always a part of larger, more complex and wonderful whole. Not to be ignored, not to be pushed away in fear or pushed down in frustration, but to be felt and known and embraced and then put back out to sea, their work done. For now.

Not quite ready to stop listening to and learning from my doubts, my I can’ts. But I will be. Soon, I hope.

*Ninth Wave (Russian: Девятый вал, Dyevyatiy val) is an 1850 painting by Russian marine painter Ivan Aivazovsky. It is his best-known work.^[1][2]

The title refers to an old sailing expression referring to a wave of incredible size that comes after a succession of incrementally larger waves.^[3]

It depicts a sea after a night storm and people facing death attempting to save themselves by clinging to debris from a wrecked ship.   Wikipedia

 

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