healing Archives

Object Lessons

Weight and the living.

We pass them between us, remaking the world one talisman at a time, each gift a salve, investing what we touch with the power of a sacred offering, so that even at a distance, they radiate life to the living.

Knowing this, we still forget. Reacting, it’s common to return to the old conditioning: things as mere tools. Here, one says, catch! A familiar thing, a cast off, a burden, an irritant: easy to forget the weight of these, the unexpected marks they will leave where they land.

We learn to hold and keep holding what makes us ill, sore, dizzy. We were made to carry, and it showed; something in us learned to accept until our legs went out again. The unlearning takes time. We invest new objects with new songs to help us remember, and touch them often, against forgetting.

How to Be Moved

Notes for a community chorus.

Like this, she said, hands open, singing. Gonna let it move me, she sang, and we followed, fingers splayed and pressing into the space of the circle we made with our attention. Now stir, she said, and we did, and it stirred us up.

Let it come, she sang. We laughed, cried. Feel this, she sang, and by then we couldn’t help ourselves because our centers had shifted to the space between us, and it was this that we pressed with our open hands. It was into this that we poured our voices, surrendered our attentions––

And we held it like that, stirring and singing together, here. Something shifted, and we went with it.

Life, she sang, let this life.

Cups

Notes on these hands.

Eventually, talk turned to having and spending; to getting and maintaining, as it often did, and you could feel the way we became coiled springs ready to fire and everyone was excited and no one could sleep, it was so much.

Another time, there was nothing and no talk anymore of what could be got. Even our resistance to loss had gone out of us, and it made us porous. There was no more talk of keeping, except when it came to someone at the hearth and the babies fed.

A vessel, once emptied, can only carry what comes into it. A hand, outstretched toward another holds the world in its emptiness. The fist is what you get when the cold is too much for too long and the hand forgets itself.

In warmth, it remembers its radius, star-like. Then cupped with another, it cradles what is delicate and brings it to the lips, an offering in earnest––or to another, saying here.

An (expanded) video version of this post is available here.

Altar

At the crossroads.

On the day of the dead, among this cloud of witnesses, someone here whispers, help me find it again, that joy I once had in looking. Instead of an answer, this space, and the hum of a motor nearby.

We love the old trees of our myths for the spaces they hold inside themselves, but also for the way they know to keep it around them, this cushion of shade made soft by the absence of another tree.

In the eruption of any given birth, a core could easily splinter, and yet here we are, faces dappled by the light and noise of becoming, learning to make room for what would breathe.

The Opposite of Narrow

Space in the body of a breath.

With every idea limited, cut to our own measure, we are always at a loss. Still, you work with what you have. Waking, there’s a hand at the lamp, a sigh, and the sense of some waiting presence. Who is here?

I knew a poet who loved the word vast because it rhymes with a whisper, breathing space wherever others are gathered. There are some sounds that can only move as soft substance, inviting an infinity into the lungs.

Upon exhalation, we are far from ourselves. It seems to happen only for a moment, but we never knew time.

Reunion

By the weeping wall.

Near the wall of weeping stones there are reminders. So much happens beyond the light. One day, someone decides that the wall deserves more of our attention, and we gather nearby. In the process, we leave parts of our lives in wrong places.

–––A full basket of laundry, for example, in the middle of the hallway in the courthouse; a bucket of dishes in the fountain of the business park. Someone thinks, why not? and we get to washing them and now all we need is food. Someone calls their cousins to bring the grill. It is suggested that here is not the place for that, and the suggestion is collectively ignored. Unbuttoning his shirt, a guard offers tables. They’re inside, he tells us. Groups bring them out.

We cover them with cloth, candles, decorative plates, bottles of liquid, prayer cards, poems. Now that we have altars, the musicians begin. Once we have music, others arrive. Now we are a large circle by the weeping wall. A naked child runs laughing to the nearby ducks, outstretched hands and fingers splayed. An official story has ruptured before its conclusion and it falls in the center of our circle, bleeding song.

Possibilities for Becoming

With Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

If much of sight is the weight of understanding––the weight of the world, as the saying goes–– why not a vision to pull us forward and up, binding us to one another and this earth? What happens when one person and then many––live in devotion to the process of discovering this renewal: its anatomy and breath, its sublimated wants, and how its needs at their core might include us? In an age of crisis, we face over and again the possibility of a coming end, on a road increasingly populated by our dead and dying. What does it take to remember love––even here, and hold it long enough to see a way to its next beginning? You noticed sacredness in imperfection, even pain––because it is, because we are, because we are becoming. Of this age of loss, you suggested, now we are getting somewhere.

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Inspired by the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Becoming Unbecoming

Undoing: an anti-manifesto.

In the spirit of helping, we began to work together, and in the process, unmade ourselves. Now we live in a hall of mirrors of our own creation, accompanied by nightmares and jokes. Some of these are our creation, others not, but there are no guards at the door. There are no doors either, so you get all kinds.

Don’t walk through here barefoot. There are shards of utopias all over the floor. If you look at certain times of day, the light playing in these is a wonder to behold.

If there are any unbroken ones out there, you can keep them. Heroes, too. We are done with all of that. Keep your mastery, your individual agency, your sense of your own significance. In our madness, we think human beings would be a good idea.

Let us play. The game is you are not yet and neither here nor there. The game is care. The game is adapt. The game is laugh. Let us begin. Begin by stopping right here.

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Inspired by, and with borrowed phrases from, the opening of Hyposubjects: Becoming Human, by Timothy Morton and Dominic Boyer.

A Centering Moment

Body and web.

Thread upon thread to bind us, forward and back in time, and no reason will save you. Given enough movement, a body becomes so unreasonably wound up in it that an old impulse returns, to believe the smallest movement of one affects the fate of all, and what follows is more touch and the grief that comes with it. The child’s glorious maximalism: no master of any fate, only servant to a call that defies translation, which is bound to make its listener seem foolish at best, and probably mad. But there it is again, the music of vibrating strings, resounding.

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Inspired by Howard Thurman: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Let There Be

Notes at twilight.

New world, lens flare: the beginning of light is the beginning of time, and who controls it moves the vision of the moment––and its form. What difference is there, at any genesis, between making space and shining into it?

Seeking, some found light until the dark begat seeking again. A hard time for thinkers, some say, though others object. Reason’s luminescence, which progressed by co-opting fire and then the lives of those deemed fit for its fuel, can only know its debt in waning radiance.

In this twilit hour, something comes. Lurching through a forest of shadows, flickering through an expanding dark, it speaks in long silences now. Given the limits of this human form, and the limits of a word designed for pointing to a nonexistent boundary between itself and other life, only when I begin to know the fullness of my nonexistence as human can I begin to say, I am.

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Inspired by Digital Light, ed. Sean Cubitt, Daniel Palmer and Nathaniel Tkacz.