Albert Ryder, A Wild Note of Longing

Tags

Albert Pinkham Ryder, art, artist, maritime paintings, myths, Paintings, reality, sailing, sea, visual art

With Sloping Mast and Sinking Prow, by Albert Pinkham Ryder

He’s considered by many the father of American modern art, and yet I’d never heard of him until visiting the New Bedford Whaling Museum this October. I was stunned and mesmerized by what I saw, and astonished I’d never seen his work before. The exhibit “A Wild Note of Longing” was aptly named. The wildness of his images, the sense of mystery and romance, evokes a kind of longing of the spirit, of the heart, for something that lies just beyond our reach.

”Have you ever seen an inch worm crawl up a leaf or twig,” Ryder once wrote, ”and then, clinging to the very end, revolve in the air, feeling for something to reach something? That’s like me. I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have a footing.”

The Flying Dutchman, by Albert Pinkham Ryder

Apparently I’m not alone in that feeling of being struck by lightning when I first discovered Ryder’s paintings so unexpectedly (in a whaling museum!). The Flying Dutchman was the first painting I saw walking into the gallery. Since coming home I’ve being doing research and came across a lecture given by artist Bill Jensen on his first encounter with Ryder’s work: “[I] rounded a corner and discovered five small Ryder paintings salon hung. I felt as if I had been hit by lightning. I had never seen paintings that had such PRESENCE.”

‘I was struck by a LIGHT that seemed to burn from deep within them. I was struck by the painting’s intense DRAMA: their EMOTIONAL AND INTELLECTUAL GESTURING of every shape, every mark, every color to every shape, mark, and color; their weight of immense DENSITY and in the next instant their WEIGHTLESSNESS. They had a feeling that time had been COMPRESSED. They had that “SLAP IN THE FACE REALITY” that reveals powerful INVISIBLE FORCES in and around us. These paintings seem to be constructed of LIVING TISSUE.’ [Emphasis his. You can read the rest of his lecture notes here.]

Sea Tragedy, by Albert Pinkham Ryder

Of course I’ve always been drawn to images of ships at sea, and that’s part of the appeal. There’s so much drama here, so much movement, you can almost hear the waves beating against the hull, the shrieking of the wind in the sails, feel your body hefted by the waves as you grasp at the rails, mesmerized by the beauty and the wildness of it all.

I wrote a poem once called Night Howl about being on a hurricane watch aboard La Gitana one night in Pago Pago, Samoa. These images remind me of that poem and that night, and so many other moonlit nights at sea.

I wrote in that blog post: “Human consciousness is the mirror through which the universe sees and knows itself, and through which we see and know ourselves—the fullness of being, our primal past and present standing face to face.” That’s what I see in Ryder’s paintings, but it’s not just the sea images that move me. It’s also his use of color and composition, the elemental shapes and striking contrasts, the way light seems to emerge out of the paintings, and the themes he choses, so many drawn from myth and legends.

Below are a few more favorites, including what is considered his masterpiece–Jonah.

The Tempest, by Albert Pinkham Ryder

Begger Maid and the King, by Albert Pinkham Ryder

Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens, by Albert Pinkham Ryder

Jonah, by Albert Pinkham Ryder

Some say Ryder is a painter of dreams. But as Jensen says in his notes on Ryder: “This can be misleading unless one understands that dreams are reality condensed.” This is true of the myths and legends and Biblical stories that he uses as points of departure to reveal what lies below the surface of our common day experience—that “something more” we yearn for that lies so tantalizingly just beyond the reach of our fingertips.

Multiple Layers of Reality in Film, and in Us

Tags

art, Consciousness, creativity, Fanny and Alexander, Film, imagination, Ingmar Bergman, layers of reality, life, Movies, multiplicity, reality

In several of his films, Ingmar Bergman plays with the notion of multiple layers of reality. This can be seen as early as The Seventh Seal, and continues with Autumn Sonata, and Wild Strawberries, culminating in what was intended to be his final film, Franny and Alexander.

In some ways, Franny and Alexander is a tour de force. It speaks to us on so many levels. It can be seen, in part, as a family saga, a farce, a fairy tale, a theatrical play, a Gothic Romance, and a supernatural horror story. It is, in fact, all these things at once.

Yet each differing perspective can be seen as a different layer of reality, a different way of looking at the same material. Each appears as a separate backdrop against which the film can be seen, which, when lifted, offers a new view, a new level of perception, a new “reality.”

We can see this in the opening sequence. The first shot reveals a close-up of what appears to be an ornate building. As the camera moves down the building, we see a row of footlights and what now appears to be a stage. A series of painted backdrops are lifted to reveal new scenes. But it is only when the last backdrop is raised that we see a child’s face, huge, behind the scenes. This is when we realize that the stage is but a child’s theater and the row of footlights are candles. The camera seems to be inviting the viewer to see through these multiple layers of “reality,” perceptions of the real, to the final revelation, the child, or rather, the child’s imagination, as revealed through his dreamy gaze.

The film continues to pull back layer after layer of curtains to reveal the tenuous and shifting nature of reality.

In the final scene, the grandmother is reading from Strindburg’s “A Dream Play.” She reads: “Anything will occur. Anything is possible and likely. Time and space do not exist. On the tenuous ground of reality, imagination reaches out and weaves a new pattern.”

Reality is seen to be not singular, but as consisting of ever-deepening layers of reality, one on top of the other, in a richly dense and complex multiplicity.

I was reminded of this film when listening to one of Alan Watt’s talks that I wrote about in another post. And I wonder if the reason Bergman’s films resonate with so many people is that we sense a truth here. We see this perspective not only in film and art, about the mystery of things, these shifting perspectives and “layers of reality,” but we see it in science, how beneath these seemingly solid bodies lies unseen, shifting worlds that swirl and collide and contradict each other.

I question often what is real and not-real, and wonder if it’s more complex than that. Perhaps it’s not a case of what’s real or not, of one or the other, but shifting perceptions of what’s real, some dark, some light, that weave together a reality that is deeper and more complex than our superficial lives allow us to see.

POSTSCRIPT: In searching for photos for this post, I happened upon Roger Ebert’s review of the film, which also, surprisingly (or maybe not so), refers to the film as having “shifted into a different kind of reality.” I’ve added an excerpt of his review here:

“There are fairy-tale elements here, but “Fanny and Alexander” is above all the story of what Alexander understands is really happening. If magic is real, if ghosts can walk, so be it. Bergman has often allowed the supernatural into his films. In another sense, the events in “Fanny and Alexander” may be seen through the prism of the children’s memories, so that half-understood and half-forgotten events have been reconstructed into a new fable that explains their lives.

What’s certain is that Bergman somehow glides beyond the mere telling of his story into a kind of hypnotic series of events that have the clarity and fascination of dreams. Rarely have I felt so strongly during a movie that my mind had been shifted into a different kind of reality. The scenes at night in the Jacobi house are as intriguing and mysterious as any I have seen, quiet and dreamy, and then disturbing when the mad Ismael calmly and sweetly shows Alexander how everything will be resolved.”

What do you think? Have you seen any of Bergman’s films? Do you think there’s more to us, or reality, than what we experience in the everyday?

I first posted this, in slightly different form, in 2014.

Hauntings, Ghosts, & Demons I Have Known

Tags

Deborah J. Brasket, Demons, Ghost Stories, Ghosts, Halloween, Haunted House, personal, Poltergeist, reality, Supernatural

As Halloween draws near, I like to repost a series of true life tales about the hauntings, ghosts, and demons I experienced growing up, and later when I had children of my own.

While I don’t ”intellectually” believe in ghosts and the supernatural, I cannot deny that the physical and psychic phenomena which I and so many others–-indeed, all known cultures and societies–-have laid claim to, are “real.” The reality they seem to have is unexplained, often unverifiable, and usually fleeting and ephemeral. And yet they persist in haunting humanity.

Throughout history, people whom we usually credit with intelligence and integrity have reported ghostly experiences, among them the psychologist Carl Jung, President Theodore Roosevelt, and Sir Winston Churchill, as well as a host of current well-known celebrities, such as Matthew McConaughey, Kate Hudson, and Halle Berry.

I can neither explain, verify, nor dismiss the reality of the experiences that I relate here. I can only state that these things occurred as I remember them, or as others I trust related them to me. And most were witnessed by more than one person.

You can read the full series of ghost stories at the links below. I’ve included excerpts from each. Enjoy!

• True Ghost Stories, Part I – Growing up in a Haunted House

Every night after my mother heard my prayers and tucked me into bed, I would pull the covers tight over my head and stay there until I fell asleep. I knew somehow that no harm would come to me if I followed this ritual. And no harm ever did come to me.

I might well have been terrified had I heard what my parents heard at night as they slept in the room below mine.

• True Ghost Stories, Part II – Attack of the Poltergeist

We had already decided to move when my mother entered the small room upstairs that had been used for storage because it was “too cold” for human habitation. She was trying to move boxes out of the room when something unseen attacked her.  It threw her to the floor and pinned her down so that she could not move. All she could do was scream for help.

• True Ghost Stories, Part III – When the Dead Refuse to Leave

That night my mother woke from an extremely vivid dream where Margaret (her mother-in-law) had come to her weeping so hard she could not speak. She hung onto my mother so tightly it scared her. It felt as if Margaret was trying to climb inside her body and she had to fight her off. The next morning my mother . . .  discovered that Margaret had died that night. 

• True Ghost Stories, Part IV – Resident Evil: In the Belly of the Beast

Shortly after moving in, I became increasingly afraid to be alone in the house. I was okay when Dale was at home. But as soon as he left for work, a creepy feeling overwhelmed me. As I walked through the house I was aware of something sinister and malicious watching me. It was as if the walls had eyes that followed me everywhere. As if I was living in the belly of the Beast.

• True Ghost Stories, Part V – A Demon on My Chest

Have you ever awoken from sleep to find yourself paralyzed with fear as if something dark and evil sitting on your chest has pinned you down? You try to scream or move, but find that you cannot. You are overcome with terror. It’s more common than you think. And it happened to me several times.

• True Ghost Stories, Part VI – Evil Incarnate

It was like a dark, evil twin had taken over me, and I was as horrified as my little friend by what was happening . . . I like to think now that it was that sad, angry, stalking presence that haunted our house that tried, unsuccessfully, to inhabit me . . . I had a taste of what true evil feels like, with all its sense of pleasure and power, and I did not like it. 

• True Ghost stories, Part VII – Do I Believe This Stuff?

So are the ghosts, demons, and other supernatural beings that have haunted humans through the centuries, that make brief appearances and then disappear, “real”? I do not know, and I’m not sure if it even matters. They are real enough to those who experience them, as least while they are experiencing them, and then afterwards, one wonders.

Each of us make but brief ghostly appearances in this world we call real. We apparently spring from nearly nothing–-a few multiplying cells, and then disappear into nothing as our bodies disintegrate after a short visitation that can last a few days or a few decades. Are we “real”?

I’d loved to hear your ghost stories. Have you had any brushings with the supernatural?

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Tags

art, Consciousness, David Bohm, Deborah J. Brasket, Indra's Net, inspiration, personal, Philosophy, reality, Science, spirituality

Dancing Poppies in a Blue Bowl by Deborah J. Brasket

I fell in love with the title of Milan Kundera’s novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” long before I ever read it. To me it evokes something unbearably joyful and rich, playful and profound.

So I was disappointed to find the novel itself, while a wonderful read, playful and profound in its own way, suggested a different interpretation of its title, a profound sadness at how fragile and transitory life is, how quickly its bright light fades.

I don’t see life that way at all. I mean, I see it, I understand why it may seem that way. But I don’t believe it.

To me, the beauty of  this “lightness of being” is not that it is “unbearable” as in too horrible to bear, but “unbearable” as in too delicious to bear, to contain. It spills over.

I think that’s what I was trying to convey in my painting of the dancing poppies in a blue bowl. The beauty of the seemingly solid things that surround us, that make up our lives, is that they are not “heavy” or “static,” but constantly in motion, “dancing” as it were through time and space.  Constantly dissolving itself and resolving into something else, similar, but not quite the same. The way the present moment dissolves and resolves instantaneously as we move through time.

There’s a wonderful analogy of the universe/reality by the physicist David Bohm. He sees reality and consciousness, what he calls the “implicate order,” as a “coherent whole, which is never static or complete but which is an unending process of movement and unfoldment.”  He likens this whole (all that ever was and ever will be) as a tightly woven ball of yarn, one infinite thread. Yet the way we perceive it through time and space is as if the ball of yarn is rolling away and unraveling before our eyes. We glimpse “what is” second by second, inch by inch, as it reveals itself to us in micro-bites and nano-seconds. It’s not that reality is actually unraveling, but that the illusion of its unraveling is how we come to comprehend it, see it, know it, love it. We are one with it all the while, even while it appears as something distinct and separate from our selves.

Another analogy that I love is Indra’s Net. Here the universe/reality is like an infinite net with a pearl at each interstice. Each pearl reflects every other pearl as well as the whole net itself. Each pearl contains within itself, as part of its own lustrous being, part of its own distinct individuality, all the others around it. The part contains the whole and vice versa.

This view of reality makes sense to me, not only from a scientific and spiritual viewpoint, but experientialy as well. I experience this every time I walk through the house and pass through one doorway after another and watch this interior landscape flowing past me, one room dissolving as a new one approaches. Every time I look out the window and take in the trees and hills and houses and sky and hold them in my mind’s eye even as I turn away. Practical, ordinary, experiences we all share.

I hold all those I love with me wherever I go as I know they do me. My breath is constantly circulating through my body as I breathe in the world around me and breath it out again. Nothing is still for even a second. All of life is in constant motion, the atoms within us and the galaxies swirling about our heads.

This is the unbearable lightness of being. Dancing poppies, dissolving bowl. Brush dipped in water and paint spilling images across a page. All this spilling together going on right here and now as you read this, my heart and mind spilling out to you.

What could be lighter, brighter, more playful and profound than that? This unbearably rich and joyful lightness of being.

Nature and Consciousness – Seeing Things as They Are

Tags

Consciousness, Metaphysics, Nature, Perception, Philosophy, reality, Science, spirituality

© Luc Viatour (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Every time I write about nature I get deep into human consciousness. You can’t really separate the two. There is no “nature” – no way to identify, quantify, categorize, articulate, or understand it—apart from human consciousness, from how we think and talk about it.

We can’t study or explore or write about nature as something separate from ourselves, our own senses and experiences, our own thinking, perceiving, observations, experimentation. In that sense, nature is subjective, no matter how hard we try to objectify it.

This is not new, of course. Better writers and thinkers, from different disciplines, have explored this in more depth and detail that I can here.

This grand book the universe . . . is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it: without these, one wanders around in a dark labyrinth.  —Galileo, Astronomer

All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view, or from the experience of the world . . . .  –Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologist

We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. –Edward Sapir, Linguist

If the world exists and is not objectively solid and preexisting before I come on the scene, then what is it? The best answer seems to that the world is only a potential and not present without me or you to observe it. . . . All of the world’s many events are potentially present, able to be but not actually seen or felt until one of us sees or feels.  –Fred Allen Wolf, Physicist

Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner—what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.
-–Rainer Maria Rilke, Poet

The sun shines not on us, but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. –John Muir, Naturalist

At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the processions of the seasons. There is nothing . . . with which I am not linked.  –Carl Jung, Psychologist

See this rock over there? This rock’s me!  –Australian Aborigine

But in the ordinary play of our day, we forget this. We experience everything outside ourselves as “not me,” “alien,” “other.” Even our own bodies are commonly experienced as “not me.” We say “my stomach growled,” or “my foot fell asleep,” or “my sinuses are acting up,” because they seem to act involuntarily, with a mind of their own, without our conscious consent. As does nature, and other people, and the things we create—toasters and cars and computers.

Separating the whole of life and existence into parts is a useful way of talking and thinking about things.

But too often we fail to put everything back together and see how interdependent it all is, how embedded we are in the whole, and the whole in us. When we fail to do so we lose a vital understanding of ourselves and the universe, and we act in ways that may be harmful to the whole.

The see the ocean in a drop of water, to see ourselves in everyone we meet, is not, as some think, merely a poetic and rosy way of looking at the world. It’s to see things as they actually are.

Original posted 8-9-2012

A Dream Within a Dream Within a . . .

Tags

choosing our paths, Dreams, Insight, magical thinking, Metaphysics, reality, waking up

My daughter’s wedding day had arrived and everything that could go wrong went wrong.  We arrived at the church only to discover no one had come to decorate it. The food we’d ordered was half-prepared.  My daughter showed up in her beautiful gown, but we’d forgotten to get her hair done or her make-up.  It was so horrible, we cancelled the wedding and sent everyone home. The wedding party climbed into a car and was driving away when my daughter said, “Stop! I can’t take this anymore, I just want it over!”

So she forced the car to pull over at a tiny diner and announced that’s where she was getting married.  I tried to talk her into going to someplace nicer, where it wasn’t so shabby and dirty. But she insisted. I remembered how I had planned to hang all the beautiful photos of her wedding on our walls at home. But how could we take photos of this! My worst nightmare was happening and it was all my fault. I shouldn’t have left the wedding planning up to her. I should have taken charge. I should have had a check-off list and made sure everything had turned our as planned. But it was too late. I screwed up. And now all my dreams for her wedding were ruined.

Then I woke up with a raging headache. And a sense of doom I could not shake.

It was crazy! Why was I having this dream?  My daughter had already had the most beautiful wedding imaginable just last year.  And she had planned it all!  I hadn’t had to lift a finger. Why would I be worried about her wedding?

Then I had a flash of insight. One after the other.

#1 Flash of Insight

This was just a dream! There had never been a reason to be so upset and despondent.  I could have changed the dream at any point–decorated the church, fixed her hair. I could have created the perfect wedding, if only I had realized I was dreaming. If only I had known I had the power to do so.

#2 Flash of Insight

This dream wasn’t about my daughter! It’s about my son. About the terrible addiction that has ruined his life, the beautiful life I had dreamed for him. And I blamed myself.  I shouldn’t have left something as important as his life up to him! I should have taken charge. I should have planned better. But now everything was ruined and there was nothing I could do about it.

#3 Flash of Insight

Maybe I’m still dreaming!  I remember how real it all seemed in my dream. Like it was really happening.  So much so that even when I woke, I couldn’t shake the sense of sadness and failure. Maybe I will wake up and find out that this is all just a dream of addiction.  Maybe in “reality,” he’s living the perfect life I’d always wanted for him, just as my daughter had had her perfect wedding.

Maybe I’d wake to find him in his perfect house with his loving wife, surrounded by his beautiful children, happy and healthy.  He’d flash me a big grin and put his arms around me and say, “Silly mama. Why so sad? You were just dreaming!”

#4 Flash of Insight

But if I can’t wake up, maybe I can at least practice lucid-dreaming, wake up enough to know this isn’t real, and that I can change things, if I could only figure out how. It’s possible, right? Isn’t change possible?

#5 Flash of Insight

Maybe this is what they call “magical thinking.”

I keep thinking of those talks by Alan Watts that I posted here not long ago. He talks about the interconnectivity of the universe and how it has evolved into human consciousness–how the very cells of our bodies and brains are made of star stuff. We are the eternal universe, he tells us. Each of us, individually, is a pinprick of the whole, and altogether we are the whole itself.

Is believing this more fantastic, more “magical,” than believing in the Big Bang in the first place? Or that an infinite number of galaxies are spinning out in space, or being gobbled up by black holes? Or more magical than the “fact” of all those electrons and neutrons spinning in the cells of our bodies like tiny galaxies?  What could be more fantastical or magical than reality! The reality we accept on “faith” because we believe what science has revealed to us.

Watts also mentioned this possibility: That we each are sparks of the divine–whatever force that created all we know–living an infinite number of lives over and over.  Sometimes we choose easy paths, sometimes difficult ones.  Sometimes we just want to see how much we can take, how far we can push ourselves, how bad it can get before we turn ourselves around.

Did my son choose his path? Did I choose mine?  Are there layers of reality, as I wrote about in my last post? Are our night dreams and waking dreams just various stages in the ever-expanding understanding of who we really are? Will we wake to another understanding of reality and realize this life is just a dream within a dream within a dream . . . and each life is just as “real” or as “magical” as the next one?

We once believed the earth was flat and the distant ocean spilled off into nothingness. Later that the sun circled the earth, and we felt smug and special at the center of the universe.  Then we woke up.

What more will we come to understand about reality–the universe and ourselves–as the eons unfold?

Wake up, Deborah, wake up.

 

 

Layers of Reality in Bergman’s “Franny and Alexander,” and in Us

Tags

Fanny and Alexander, Film, Ingmar Bergman, meaning of life, Philosophy, reality

In several of his films, Ingmar Bergman plays with the notion of multiple layers of reality.  This can be seen as early as The Seventh Seal, and continues with Autumn Sonata, and Wild Strawberries, culminating in what was intended to be his final film, Franny and Alexander.

In some ways, Franny and Alexander is a tour de force. It speaks to us on so many levels. It can be seen, in part, as a family saga, a farce, a fairy tale, a theatrical play, a Gothic Romance, and a supernatural horror story. It is, in fact, all these things at once.

Yet each differing perspective can be seen as a different level of reality, a different way of looking at the same material. Each appears as a separate backdrop against which the film can be seen, which, when lifted, offers a new view, a new level of perception, a new “reality.”

We can see this in the opening sequence. The first shot reveals a close-up of what appears to be an ornate building. As the camera moves down the building, we see a row of footlights and what now appears to be a stage. A series of painted backdrops are lifted to reveal new scenes. But it is only when the last backdrop is raised that we see a child’s face, huge, behind the scenes. This is when we realize that the stage is but a child’s theater and the row of footlights are candles. The camera seems to be inviting the viewer to see through these multiple layers of “reality,” perceptions of the real, to the final revelation, the child, or rather, the child’s imagination, as revealed through his dreamy gaze.

The film continues to pull back layer after layer of curtains to reveal the tenuous and shifting nature of reality.

In the final scene, the grandmother is reading from Strindburg’s “A Dream Play.” She reads: “Anything will occur. Anything is possible and likely. Time and space do not exist. On the tenuous ground of reality, imagination reaches out and weaves a new pattern.”

Reality is seen to be not singular, but as consisting of ever-deepening layers of reality, one on top of the other, in a richly dense and complex multiplicity.

I was reminded of this film when listening to Alan Watt’s talks that I posted last week here. And I wonder if the reason Bergman’s films resonate with so many people is that we sense a truth here. We see this perspective not only in film and art, about the mystery of things, these shifting perspectives and “layers of reality,” but we see it in science, how beneath these seemingly solid bodies lies unseen, shifting worlds that swirl and collide and contradict each other.

I question often what is real and not-real, and wonder if it’s more complex than that. Perhaps it’s not a case of what’s real or not, of one or the other, but shifting perceptions of what’s real, some dark, some light, that weave together a reality that is deeper and more complex than our superficial lives allow us to see.

I’m still piecing this together and will explore this further in another post.

In the meantime, what do you think? Have you seen the film? Does any of this make any sense?

POSTSCRIPT

In searching for some photos and links for this post, I happened upon Roger Ebert’s review of the film, which also, surprisingly (or maybe not so), refers to the film as having “shifted into a different kind of reality.” I’ve added an excerpt of his review here:

“There are fairy-tale elements here, but “Fanny and Alexander” is above all the story of what Alexander understands is really happening. If magic is real, if ghosts can walk, so be it. Bergman has often allowed the supernatural into his films. In another sense, the events in “Fanny and Alexander” may be seen through the prism of the children’s memories, so that half-understood and half-forgotten events have been reconstructed into a new fable that explains their lives.

What’s certain is that Bergman somehow glides beyond the mere telling of his story into a kind of hypnotic series of events that have the clarity and fascination of dreams. Rarely have I felt so strongly during a movie that my mind had been shifted into a different kind of reality. The scenes at night in the Jacobi house are as intriguing and mysterious as any I have seen, quiet and dreamy, and then disturbing when the mad Ismael calmly and sweetly shows Alexander how everything will be resolved.”

Tremble of a Leaf, Balancing Interior and Exterior Lives

Tags

Experience, finding balance, human consciousness, Nature, Oneness, poetry, reality, Zen

I wrote this poem as a grad student while living in that highly interior world of academia. I’d been feeling out of balance and needing to reconnect to the world around me. Then I saw a leaf tremble in a light breeze “and saw more life in it than in me.”

I wanted that. That ability to be spontaneously receptive and responsive to the world around me. To tremble deliciously in the breeze’s embrace.

Tremble of a Leaf

The tremble of a leaf awoke me.

So far inside I had gone,
 Where id and ego threw
Long shadows across my mirrored face
To mystify me.

Where I dug odd relics
From a befuddled past,
Gazing long to find some answer
That escaped me.

Where men were but some
dark puzzle, pieces
I never bothered to make whole—
Only analyze.

Where Nature herself
Roused no awe in me,
Needing only to be computed
To comprehend.

So far inside I had gone
That when the wind passed over me
I moved not—

Only to see a leaf tremble,
And see more life in it
Than in me.

We are constantly navigating between the interior and exterior world, but sometimes one gets privileged over the other and we feel off-balanced. This happens in the world of academia with its classrooms and labs and libraries and constant reading and writing and talking. It also happens to us as writers, bloggers, gamers—this plugged in generation, with all the texting and tweeting, the TV viewing, internet surfing.

So often I see people, young and old, walking down the street wearing ear buds, listening to music instead of the wind blowing through the birches, talking to someone on a cell phone, rather than connecting with the children playing on the lawns they pass.

Sometimes we try to get out of our heads and into our bodies through sports or working out, yoga and dance, digging in the garden, taking hikes. Travel helps too, because it takes us into the unfamiliar and makes the exterior exotic, interesting in a way it has ceased to be at home.

But even then, if our heads are filled with constant chattering—thinking, worrying, weighing, measuring, planning, remembering, anticipating—we’re still in our heads, the interior dialogue is drowning out the exterior, acting as a filter to keep us from being as spontaneously responsive to the world around us as we could be.

That’s why I like to practice “no-mind,” having no thought, as I move through my day. Turning out the interior chatter allows me to experience the exterior world with no filters, nothing coming between me and it. Pure experience. It’s like when we try relaxing, concentrating on releasing the tension in each part of our body until we finally go limp. Emptying the mind is like that. The body is still there, the mind is still there, we are still there, but we experience a sense of clarity and peace that seems egoless, bodiless. A surrendering to “what-is,” not unlike surrendering to the water when floating on our backs, letting ourselves melt into its flexible support. Body, water, one thing.

Ironically, the letting go of the interior chatter, letting go of the filters that divide us into I and Other, this and that, here and there, this pure unfiltered experience of the exterior, enables us to realize that “in reality” there is no interior and exterior. It’ all one thing, one be-ing, not an “it” but a continuum and a spaciousness, a wall-less sense of self that includes everything around us. Interior and exterior merge into a single co-existence. Like moonlight on water. Interior and exterior reflecting each other.

This sense of oneness never lasts very long, alas. Like floating on your back or going limp, an orgasm or the scent of orange blossoms. It’s all fleeting. But it’s nice to know we’re not fleeting. We’re the flow. And all these fleeting things flow with us. Not two.

The tremble of a leaf woke me to the need to be responsive to the world around me, to experience it unfiltered by thought. But it’s nice to know that no matter how far inside we go, how interior we become, the exterior is only a touch, a glance, away. A mere turn of the head, a pause between thoughts that widens, a stillness that cuts through the clutter of our minds, and we feel that breeze, and tremble in its embrace.

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