Tag Archives: spirit

Magic and the real

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“Logic only gives man what he needs… Magic gives him what he wants.” ~ Tom Robbins

I’m fascinated by the popularity of magical fantasy worlds. The empire of the “Harry Potter” series – books, audiobooks, films, amusement park, merch – is just one example. More recently, the book, “The Night Circus,” became an international best seller. My son and I were hooked on the British show, “Merlin,” which ran for five seasons. It’s the backstory of Merlin and Arthur as young men. The voiceover at the beginning says, “In a land of myth and a time of magic. . . .”

What’s behind our attraction to these kinds of stories?

Maybe we turn to these fictional worlds of magic to soothe our longing for the actual magic of the wild world from which we have disconnected. Continue reading →

Love, conditional and unconditional

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Years ago, a therapist countered my confession of longing to be loved unconditionally with this statement: there is no such thing as unconditional love. Being used to therapists who are more Socratic, I was shocked at the bluntness.

It felt wrong to me, like admitting defeat in a game you weren’t even playing. What’s the point of intimate relationships, if not to be loved, warts and all? Through thick and thin and all that. It felt like our marriage vows are worded just so, to bind us into something before it dawns on us how over our heads we’ve gotten. Continue reading →

How does science explain a numinous presence?

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The film, “Rosewater,” is based on the memoir of Iranian-born journalist Maziar Bahari, who was held in solitary confinement for almost four months following the controversial 2009 elections. I haven’t read his book, but was intrigued that he was visited in his cell by his dead father (who had also been jailed for his politics, under the Shah), as well as his late sister Maryam, who was jailed under the revolutionary government in the 1980s.

Such a presence is not so uncommon, given the right circumstances. It appears when someone is in an extreme or unusual environment, such as mountaineering, shipwreck, natural disaster, mine accident, terrorist attack, space exploration, or the extreme isolation and loneliness experienced in solitary confinement. Continue reading →

The love song of head, heart and hands

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At my son’s grade school, there was a conscious engagement of head, heart and hands. Using them together requires a dynamic balance between intuition, reason, and action. These tools of the body enable us to interact with and make our mark on the world.

In a balanced person, the heart and hands have an equal role to play, not only to implement plans that the head comes up with, but in deciding what to do in the world and how to do it. Continue reading →

Are we redeemable?

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Living under the regime of our current cultural stories gives us an ambiguous relationship with redemption. Take for example the certainty that we’re all going to die. We are so wedded to the material world that any version of an illness or dying story that brings in mystical or supernatural dimensions feels like a forced smiley-face fantasy, hopelessly naïve. The sanctioned story we have of death is that it’s a failure to be avoided, and ultimately, an inevitable slide into nothingness.

This is the aspect of old story that tells us that we are Alone in a Cold Universe. Death is a force greater than us, merciless and impersonal, to which we must inevitably submit. Such powerlessness has no place in a redemption story. Continue reading →

Nostalgia is my body’s cry of longing

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In my master’s thesis, I wrote about two properties of the materials we build with: denotative and connotative. Mostly, we think of building materials as themselves – a brick is a brick, a steel beam is a steel beam. But I discovered another, subtler quality – what the material connotes, the assorted cultural values and meanings that are assigned to it.

What I didn’t know at the time – and have been discovering lately – is this is just the tip of the iceberg, the human story about that material. In reality, everything is animate, even bricks and steel beams, and certainly the trees and ore and fire from which they are made. Materials awaken something within us, because our senses reach out to and are seen and touched by them, in ongoing but unacknowledged communication. Continue reading →

What can we know about the unseen?

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The writer Margaret Atwood spoke in a recent interview about the “Third Man Factor,” which is when a person in an extreme situation feels and hears a spirit-like presence, a sort of guardian angel that encourages, gives guidance, or imparts vital information. The explorer Ernest Shackleton and aviator Charles Lindbergh have both spoken about the experience.

The human imagination is so vast as to seem boundless, and it’s only one tiny part of the dream of the universe that gave birth to us. Many phenomena are simply beyond the reach of rational analysis, but curiosity compels us to study them anyway, using the tools we have available. And, in our culture, science has arguably the highest status among those tools.

In his book on the subject, John Geiger makes the point that, despite scientific study, we don’t know definitively what’s going on. Continue reading →

A case for direct experience

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I’m in a rain-misted spring forest examining a batch of cheeky green fungus that has flagged me down. In sliding my eyes along the fallen branch it’s growing on, I notice a snail shell and marvel at its size and intricacy, thinking it’s exactly like a shell one might find along a beach. Then I notice a white fungus, same shape as the green, but with wedding-dress frills instead of garden-party apple green flounces. And just like that, metaphors have crashed the party.

This setting teaches me that metaphor is a habit of culture, a way of mediating direct experience and keeping my distance with cleverness. Continue reading →

The poetry of thresholds

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Former Poet Laureate Billy Collins has quipped that poetry will continue until everything has been compared to everything else. I like to play with that in design and writing, to bring in something seemingly unrelated and let it illuminate a previously invisible aspect of the subject. It’s one of the joys of collaborating with other people – their contributions always open a door into new possibilities.

Comparison reveals hidden connections. The poet Pablo Neruda’s view of art has been described as coming out of a longing for mutuality. Isn’t that what poets do so well? Rilke asks a knight to tell us how, by remaining armored, we miss out on the beauties and joys of the world. Or he erects a bridge to give us a way to move between contrasting (possibly warring) aspects of ourselves, especially to try out our little-used qualities. Continue reading →

Garden of duality

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2008_9.23_620wI am fascinated by mythic stories. Origin stories and creation myths say a lot about the culture that tells them. The Garden of Eden story is a familiar one to many modern Westerners, coming out of the Abrahamic religions.

Joseph Campbell has an interesting interpretation of the Garden of Eden story, of Adam and Eve’s Fall, as a slipping into dualism. The fruit is from the Tree of Opposites – good and evil, yes, but also male and female, light and dark. Before they tasted its fruit, Adam and Eve were one, in harmony and paradise. After the Fall, we have a dualistic state. We have a separation from nature and God is also separate from nature. Continue reading →