[A] society is defined by its boundaries; a culture is defined by its horizons. […] A horizon is a phenomenon of vision. One cannot look at the horizon; it is simply the point beyond which we cannot see.* (James Carse)
When it’s your turn, it’s your turn. You own it. Your choice. Your freedom. Your responsibility.** (Seth Godin)
Boundaries are vertical, horizons are horizontal.
Boundaries exist because of some resistance on the other side of the line, horizons are open, we can never reach them
The future will be more about horizons than boundaries, if we want it to be.
[I]t is only through the part we have access to the whole, only through the limited that we have access to the unlimited, only through passivity that we have access to activity; but it is only through the whole that we have access to the part, only through the unlimited do we have access to the limited, only through activity do we have access to passivity.* (Friedrich Schiller)
Perhaps Jung’s most compelling contribution is the idea of individuation, that is, the lifelong project of becoming more nearly the whole person we were meant to be – what the gods intended, not the parent, or the tribe, or especially, the easily intimidated or inflated ego.** (James Hollis)
We ought to have no idea of who we can become over a lifetime.
If it were scripted from the beginning then it would be limiting. Our limitations are only a doorway to the unlimited. And your myths as expressions of the unlimited and, as such, are doorways to the limited:
Infinite players are not serious actors in any story, but the joyful poets of a story that continues to originate what they cannot finish.^
Buzz Lightyear wants to explore infinity and beyond infinity, and perhaps what he’ll find is “finity” – for we need both. The trick is to not only to hold the finite in the infinite but also the infinite within the finite: the infinite within the finite within the infinite.
The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily – perhaps not possibly – chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.* (Eudora Welty)
I struggle to keep hold of all the meaningful words I have read in my ongoing journal so when I reread these from Eudora Welty I thought I’d “hide” them within this post.
They present us with the reality that we see things differently to how they are – a way of seeing that comes with the territory of having broken out of the circularity of life that others species are immersed in.
Some words I began with this morning are these from “The Teacher”:
The wind blows to the south, and goes round to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they continue to flow. All things are wearisome; more than one can express; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, or the ear filled with hearing.**
Allowing for what the Teacher didn’t know about how rainfall and oceans work, he has everything^ and yet is so mightily bored, only able to see everything and everyone with the same eyes. How different to what James Carse is imagining when he writes about the infinite traveller:
Genuine travel has no destination. Travellers do not go somewhere, but constantly discover they are somewhere else.^^
If we are such a traveller then we do not:
look on nature as a sequence of changing scenes but look on ourselves as persons in passage.^^
Carse has been putting forward an argument that everything is nature and so nature has no inside or outside, and so we cannot travel through it, instead:
All travel is therefore change within the traveller, and it is for that reason that travellers are always somewhere else. To travel is to grow.^^
Here is an end to the circularity that bores the Teacher so. He needs to see through more eyes:
The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.*^
Why be imprisoned into one way of seeing things when there are so many ways available to us?
I’ve removed and added some words from the following sentences of Carse so as to offer permission, a mandate for possibility:
look everywhere for differences, […] see the earth as source, […] celebrate the genius in others, […] not [to be] prepared against but for surprise^^.
If Carse is correct and there is no inside and outside to nature then, because we are nature, there can be no inside or outside to you and me and we can become travellers who realise we’re not going somewhere but constantly discovering we are somewhere else, so:
May your soul beautify The desire of your eyes That you might glimpse The infinity that hides In the simple sights That seem worn To our usual eyes.^*
Infinite speakers must wait to see what is done with their language by the listeners before they can know what they have said.* (James Carse)
Yesterday I was involved in a conversation about a university listening project.
We all listen but how?
Sometimes listening means being aware of what others are saying and ignoring them.
It can mean listening to a different point of view in order to argue a better point of view.
Another form of listening puts arguments aside and is simply curious about the other.
Then there’s listening for the response of the other to know whether what we have said opens possibility for both ourselves and the other, to know, to feel and to act.
This is infinite listening and all are able to develop this capacity.
Time does not pass for an infinite player. Each moment of time is a beginning. Each moment is not the beginning of a period of time. It is the beginning of an event that gives the time within it its specific quality.* (James Carse)
Theatrically, my birth is an event of plotted repetition. I am born as another member of my family and my culture. Who I am is a question already answered by the content and character of a tradition. Dramatically, my birth is the rupture of that repetitive sequence, an event certain to change what the past has meant. In this case the character of tradition is determined by who I am. Dramatically speaking, every birth is the birth of genius.* (James Carse)
To be an artist is to be on the hook, to take your turn, to do the things that might not work, to see connection, to embrace generosity first, to change someone, to be human.** (Seth Godin)
We are all person-artists. First and foremostly of ourselves. We create a different story alongside the script nature has included us in.
Second and very importantly, when we do this and we work out our art, we help others to figure who they are, what their art should be.
I can name the people who helped me in this way.
Although we may begin to help each other by looking, we come to understand there is a difference between looking and seeing:
To look at is to look for.*
To look at you is to bring my own perspectives, lenses and filters to bear. It’s a beginning. To see you, though, is to allow who you are to come to me and I merely help you to see this for yourself.
The world is a mystery of the dark depths of the unconscious and the dark out of which all has come. […] And the sense of myth is that we all ride on a mystery, and we are manifestations of it, whether it’s the nature world or the human world. They are not apart.* (Joseph Campbell)
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It’s the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.** (Albert Einstein)
Yesterday I was exploring how we we are unselfed by our openness to beauty in nature and art, moving from the false self of the ego to the true self of the eco.
Art and artisanship puts this within reach of all of us and finding our story or myth helps us to move towards it:
Artisans have their soul in the game.^
Nassim Taleb provides four reasons for this claim: artisans put existential reasons ahead of economic; there is art in their profession rather than industrialisation; they have pride in what they do; and there are things they would never do. This is a describing of “proper” artisanship rather than “improper,” a distinction for art made by Joseph Campbell between art that is a response to the power of nature and art that is for sale:
On the tops of all the hills, there is silence. In the tops of the trees, you feel hardly a breath. The little bird falls silent in the trees. Simply wait. Soon, you too will be silent.^^
I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. And of course this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care.* (Iris Murdoch)
Yesterday I was exploring how to find our true voice requires a deep journey to the centre of our lives. I think Iris Murdoch would refer to this as unselfing, to leave the ego behind, specifically through beauty in nature and art.
Friedrich Schiller writes about beauty being the means by which we achieve our potential as humans:
In other words, man should only play with beauty, and he should play onlywith beauty.**
What we have in nature, and in art’s response to nature, is power; they provide us with the opportunity to submit to power, to unself. We become powerful people only as far as we are willing to submit to the great powers, which also means we must submit to the imperfect – there is no perfect beauty, no perfect world, no perfect art, no perfect person.
I have walked out of the body and into the mountain. I am a manifestation of its total life, as is the starry saxifrage or the white-winged ptarmigan.^
So the first question we must ask ourselves isn’t how to get our idea to spread—it’s how can we do or say something worth believing in.* (Bernadette Jiwa)
The whole ideas that you’ve got to bring out again that which you went to recovery the unrealised, unutilised potential in yourself.** (Joseph Campbell)
Loud isn’t the same as deep.
A loud voice wants to be heard over others.
The deep voice wants to speak with the depths of others.
It requires we journey to the centre of our lives, a desire to know ourselves more completely and to speak only from here.
It is only possible to hear our true voice when we are able to hear the deep voices of others.
For my post today, I thought to walk through some thoughts as they developed. Here’s where I began with Jesus of Nazareth encouraging people not to get caught up in the basics of life:
And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.*
We have our happy distractions: we look busy, we feel busy, we make up a lot of meaning around being busy, but it all gets in the way of the daily iterations of the big thing we want to do with our life.
As I was thinking about this, I read Austin Kleon’s blog about starting before were think we’re ready in which he quotes writer David McCullough:
There’s an awful temptation to just keep on researching. There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing. When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book. In time I began to understand that it’s when you start writing that you really find out what you don’t know and need to know.**
We need to begin the journey, the whole “we make the road by walking” thing.
Our problem can be we don’t want to fail, or to be seen to fail, and so we wait until we’re pretty sure we won’t, missing the point that some of our best work, choices and growings will emerge from mistakes, errors and failures.
Another word for this is playing. This is a word I hold dearly from reading James Carse and Johan Huizinga. Most recently, I have come upon the word being used by Friedrich Schiller more than a hundred years earlier than Carse and Huizinga. Here Schiller is referring to the two human impulses for change and immutability:
But then what is mere play, once we know that under all conditions of man it is exactly play, and only play, that makes him complete, and begins to develop his dual nature.^
Play provides us with the imaginative and creative space we need not to be doing all the time. If you like, doing nothing is very much a part of our doing, to notice, pay attention listen. I came upon these words from Holly McGee in Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings:
Listen to the sound of your feet — the sound of all of us and the sound of me.^^
As I read these words, I felt they connected with some written by Nan Shepherd on widening the domain of being, a capacity to deepen meaning that we each possess:
So, simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.*^
Busyness is what gets in our way of this, so I had to smile when I opened gapingvoid’s blog telling me I’m part of the busy people’s club like everyone else, busyness getting in the way of deepening:
You hate your life yet you’ve not read a book in twenty years.^*
In his delightful stories of time behaving differently, Alan Lightman pens these words about a place in which people’s lives are infinite:
The Laters sit in cafés sipping coffee and discussing the possibilities of life. The Nows note that with infinite lives, they can do all they can imagine.⁺
Begin. Don’t wait. The danger is, even with endless time, we may never begin, but when we begin, infinity opens before us.
THIN|SILENCE 
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