Good Morning Digital Neighbors! Happy Monday Friends & Refugees, Phamily & Dawn Patrol, Fascinating People, Bigots and Triggeratti, Seekers of Sanity & Civility and all of you ADD Irregulars and Wanderers of the WSN! As many in the Rubin Report and Phetasy communities know I have a fondness for words. There is something magical about them. To know that I can read something from thousands of years ago and it can still communicate meaning to me, it can still connect me to another person I will never meet on this side reality is nothing short of spectacular to me. WORDS - they have a power and reality all on the own. I am in love with the LOGOS - conceptional and Incarnational.
It is something of a curse for me, I am horrible at proofreading and my grammatical errors are plentiful and part of the late morning re-reading of my posts and trying to reconfigure what it was I wanted to communicate in the early hours of my day. There are mornings when I wonder what "Early Tom" was trying to say in a sentence or paragraph. While I do enjoy writing, I loathe grammar even when there would be no writing without it.
I want to thank Zoom @zoomerqc for suggesting a book for me to explore. It has been a wonderful recommendation for a novice logophile. Consolations The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte. It has been a thoughtful book to begin to explore. I will share some quotes and commentary of my own this week. A brief look into the introduction was really helpful to me.
In Consolations, David Whyte repatriates us in the land of language by giving words back to themselves and, in this generous act, giving us back to ourselves - we, sensemaking creatures who navigate this old maze of a world through the mightiest figuring faculty we have: language itself. . . . On the enchanted loom of his poetic imagination, Whyte mends these most threadbare words into splendid tapestries of thought and feeling, lush with reclaimed meaning. What emerges is that supreme gift of being: a deeper sense of belonging - of words, to words, and to ourselves.
The following are some quotes lifted from the book on given words along with a little commentary of my own.
ALONE
It is a word that can be felt at the same time as an invitation to depth and as an imminent threat, as in ‘all alone’, with its returned echo of abandonment. ‘Alone’ is a word that rings with a strange finality, especially when contained in that haunting aggregate, ‘left all alone’, as if the state once experienced begins to define and engender its own inescapable world. The first step in spending time alone is to admit how afraid of it we are.
Being alone is a difficult discipline: a beautiful and difficult sense of being solitary is always the ground from which we step into a contemplative intimacy with the unknown, but the first portal of aloneness is often experienced as a gateway to alienation, grief and abandonment. To find ourselves alone or to be left alone is an ever-present, fearful and abiding human potentiality of which we are often unconsciously, and deeply, afraid.
For a solitary life to flourish, even if it is only for a few precious hours, aloneness asks us to make a friend of silence, and just as importantly to inhabit that silence in our own particular way, to find our very own way into our own particular, and even virtuoso, way of being alone.
One of the best ways to gauge personal and communal health is how well we can handle being alone. Is it something desired or dreaded? While I enjoy and love company, and appreciate the gift of my neighbors, digital and physical, I do enjoy time alone and periods of silence. Retreats are great times for prolonged silence and aloneness. They serve as a spiritual and personal reset for me. In the ancient world there was a desire for being alone by many of the mystics, philosophers and devoted as a space and place of contemplation and encounter with the deeper, more mysterious currents of life that are missed in our busyness and frenetic engagement.
How much is that the opposite of current life and our dread of silence and aloneness? We punish people with solitary confinement. Contrasted with the Ancients who would have treasured such a gift, we know how unmoored we have become from ourselves and from reality. The ever present pull of the "smart" phone, the importance of "feeling in the know", to be engaged, desired and sought after are all signs of some creeping illness which infects most if not all of us.
No pedestals for living is a phrase I often repeat to my parish family. That phrase is a humble reminder to remember that even the people we admire and esteem have their own issues, struggles and often failures. We should not embrace cynicism even when we have such great cause to surrender to it. Patience and playful skepticism has always been enough for me to handle the inconsistencies of humanity. I strive to love the real, not the perfect. I know the creeping illness that infects many, has left its mark on me. Being alone, befriending silence and embracing stillness is all part of my recovery program. Happy Monday friends and thanks for indulging me this morning.
Old Country Barn in Autumn by Jeff Severson
