THE WELL WITHIN WORKSHOP

They’re not speaking to one another. Again.

In couples therapy work, this is referred to as “violent silence.”

My decades-long experience in providing therapeutic support for disruptions and disconnections stemming from fractured communication had nevertheless left me woefully ill-prepared for the firm, unyielding refusal on the part of my Android phone to speak to my Honda Accord.

It’s not the first time they’ve gone silent with one another. A system update may have triggered this most recent disconnection that in any event had me parked in the driveway with the car running, searching Claude, Reddit, then Google, the Honda user manual, then back to Google. This went on for an interminable amount of time as I was determined to figure it out, urgent in the searching, convinced that success was right around the corner. There was something about watching myself in this process that brought to mind my therapy work many years ago with clients in the throes of addiction. I remembered learning what at the time sounded counterintuitive and yet was supported by research and patient reports alike: that of all the addictions hardest to beat, including cocaine and heroin, none was a match for cigarettes. Why? Because at that time (the 1990’s), cigarettes were welcomed everywhere you were, woven into the fabric of daily life. Enjoy a cigarette with that first cup of coffee and the morning paper. Tuck that portable rectangle pack in your pocket or purse and enjoy a smoke on the commute. A cigarette as an after-lunch treat. A companion smoke on the ride home from work. An after-dinner smoke ritual. That last smoke before bed. Comfort and company always at your fingertips.

Phones now occupy the spaces once held by cigarettes with, as we continue to learn, seismic and sobering health hazards for body, mind, and society.

Despite my phone’s inescapable hold on me (thanks to the device’s attention engineers and their Vegas slot machine expertise), I somehow, out of nowhere, hear the quietest call. Out of the corner of my eye, just outside the passenger window, a towering crown of pure white catches my attention. Our magnolia tree, in full bloom, seemed to be extending a kind of invitation. Having moved through 31 prior blooming seasons with this particular tree, I knew in the fibers of my being that this particular moment was the absolute pinnacle, that from here things would turn quickly and the show would be over.

I turn off the motor and step out of the car, leaving my phone and all that urgent fervor behind.

I walk towards the tree, my feet feeling solid on the brown Spring ground. As I get closer, the blooms’ citrusy-cinnamony fragrance, saturated in the cool, dewy air, wraps itself around my face. Now I’m nose-to-nose with one spectacular bloom after the next in shades of cool, creamy white and the occasional brushstroke of fuchsia. As in years past, I’m astonished by the sheer beauty and bounty and I’m so grateful to be seeing and experiencing all of this. Time stood still and so did I, knowing that this is the moment, right here, right now. By tomorrow, I told myself, or maybe even by evening, the end will have begun.

I think we get these calls all the time, but because they don’t arrive with blinking lights or dinging beeps, no blaring soundtrack and no engineered trickery holding our attention captive in subversive ways, we’re at risk of missing them and missing all of the nourishment they offer. My magnolia tree doesn’t want to sell me anything, except maybe escape from what only moments before felt like a kind of imprisonment. Maybe it won’t be a blooming tree that calls to you. Maybe it’s your newborn’s astonishingly blue eyes or the keys on the piano you inherited from your grandmother, your paintbrushes propped up in that cloudy mason jar, the hummingbird that returns to your feeder every year, or your own home-grown Roma tomatoes hanging there on the vine. Whatever it is for you, despite its protestations to the contrary, your phone, for all its undeniable uses and benefits, is, in the end, an unworthy substitute for your own full presence, your complete and deeply nourishing sensory engagement, with real life.

Artist and writer Jenny Odell’s escape, as she notes in How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, is her beloved hometown spot in Pasadena:

But in the long meantime, as I sit in the deep bowl of the Rose Garden, surrounded by various human and non-human bodies, inhabiting a reality interwoven by myriad bodily sensitivities besides my own—indeed, the very boundaries of my own body overcome by the smell of jasmine and just-ripening blackberry—I look down at my phone and wonder if it isn’t its own kind of sensory-deprivation chamber. That tiny, glowing world of metrics cannot compare to this one, which speaks to me instead in breezes, light and shadow, and the unruly, indescribable detail of the real.

I took a long, last look at our magnolia tree, inhaled deeply and then, having quite literally returned to my senses, I returned to my car, savoring the calm and contentment. My phone sat on the passenger seat where I’d left it. And though my Android was still not talking to my Honda, I pulled into the garage, remembering how much I enjoy driving without any talking.

. . .

p.s. Thank you for being here with me. I want to let you know that I’m posting over at Substack, too, and so if your reading is easier in that space, I’d welcome your warm company there.

“The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks, which the stream anciently trashed, before science began to record its freshets. Everyone has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple tree wood, which had stood in the farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts — from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared, by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which as been gradually converted into the semlance of its well-seasoned tomb — heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished famly of man, as they sat around the festive board — may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last! … Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”

~ Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau, as quoted in An Almanac for the Soul: Anthology of Hope by Marv and Nancy Hiles

“It is strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you alone. Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits. A world lives within you. No one else can bring you news of this inner world. If we become addicted to the external, our interiority will haunt us. We will become hungry with a hunger no image, person, or deed can still. To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new, together. No one else can undertake this task for you. You are the one and only threshold of an inner world. This wholesomeness is holiness. To be holy is to be natural, to befriend the worlds that come to balance in you. Behind the facade of image and distraction, each person is an artist in this primal and inescapable sense. Each one of us is doomed and privileged to be an inner artist who carries and shapes a unique world.”

~ John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

There is a fallow time for the spirit when the soil is barren because of sheer exhaustion. It may come at the end of a long, long period of strenuous effort. It may result from the plateau of tragedy that quietly wore away the growing edge of alertness until nothing was left but the exhausted roots of aliveness. Perhaps too much anxiety, a too-hard trying, a searching strain to do by oneself what can never be done that way, has made one’s spirit seem like a water tap whose washer is worn out from too much pressure. But there may be the simplest possible explanation: the rhythmic ebb and flow of one’s powers, simply this and nothing more. Whatever may be the reasons, one has to deal with the fact. Face it! Then resolutely dig out dead roots, clear the ground, but don’t forget to make a humus pit against the time when some young or feeble plants will need stimulation from past flowerings in your garden. Work out new designs by dreaming daring dreams and great and creative planning. The time is not wasted. The time of fallowness is a time of rest and restoration, of filling up and replenishing. It is the moment when the meaning of all things can be searched out, tracked down, and made to yield the secret of living.

~ Deep Is the Hunger: Meditations for Apostles of Sensitiveness by Howard Thurman, as quoted in Almanac for the Soul: Anthology of Hope

We’re nearing the final stretch of February, the longest month of the year for many here in the Midwestern USA, where a bright white blanket of snow belies the underlying deep, deep dark. A fertile dark where the makings of a resplendent Spring are already underway, bulbs and blooms, rhizomes and saplings and every species of moss all destined for an immensity of green teeming with vitality and aliveness, none of which would be possible without the irrepressible nourishment and unshakable sustenance and stillness of a deep, deep dark.

All that we are, or ever hope to be, began in a dark place. Darkness is our first reality.  

No mud.  No lotus. ~James Crews

Awareness itself, the full light of consciousness containing all that we see, feel, and know, has its suckling roots in the enveloping darkness of the unconscious. Carl Jung recognized the unconscious as a container for the deepest mysteries and the fullest wisdom of our shared collective ancestral heritage, a chorus of knowing that’s singing us onward and outward, upward and forward. Seen in this way, each one of us carries an incubating life force that’s inextricably connected to, and even propelled by, the collective energies of those life forces that came before us, making contact with us in the depths of our sleep, in the deep dark of our dreams. 

You, darkness, that I come from
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything-
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!-
powers and people-

and it is possible a great presence is moving near me.

I have faith in night.

~You, Darkness, Rainer Maria Rilke

Today’s climate, with its 24-hour news cycles, stores-that-never-close, lights-always-on-all-the-time, gives dark a bad rap. The necessary dark of fertile inwardness, it turns out, isn’t great for consumerism and commerce. Nature herself is conspiring to turn the lights on—here in the Midwest, we’ve already lost almost 2 hours of daily darkness since the Winter Solstice. All the more reason to remember that we carry our winters within us, that the womb of our connection to our possibilities and potentials is always available if only we’re able, from time to time, to extricate ourselves from all that would have us forgetting that our connection to this nurturing place isn’t contingent on the season, or a Prime membership. It rides on us remembering and then turning our attention inward, befriending again and again, that deep, deep dark.    

Everything vanishes around me, and works are born, as if out of the void.  Ripe, graphic fruits fall off.  My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will.  ~Paul Klee

Photo: Fish Magic, Paul Klee (1925), Philadelphia Museum of Art

By now you’ve probably heard the story, that eagle-eyed readers perusing the most recent edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary spotted the disappearance of a number of nature-based words. Words like blackberry, acorn, minnow, and fern—gone. Why? To make room for words from the lexicon of digital technology, such as analogue, broadband, cut-and-paste, and voicemail.

Petitions ensued with over 50,000 signatures garnered. An open letter to Oxford University Press, the publisher of OJD, signed by Margaret Atwood and twenty-seven of her well-published compatriots, urged “that a deliberate and publicised decision to restore some of the most important nature words would be a tremendous cultural signal and message of support for natural childhood.”

We recognise the need to introduce new words and to make room for them and do not intend to comment in detail on the choice of words added. However it is worrying that in contrast to those taken out, many are associated with the interior, solitary childhoods of today. In light of what is known about the benefits of natural play and connection to nature; and the dangers of their lack, we think the choice of words to be omitted shocking and poorly considered.

The Guardian

And then there’s this:

The Lost Words, a large, enchanting book by British writer and University of Cambridge Professor Robert Macfarlane, with illuminating watercolors by Jackie Morris, celebrates twenty of the nature words that had been removed from OJD. The Lost Words is a “spell book,” poetic celebrations of each of these words that are meant, according to Macfarlane, to be spoken aloud, encouraging young and old readers alike to rekindle their connections to kingfisher, otter, weasel, and wren, beckoning them back into common use with something akin to poetry or song.

Speaking of song:

We humans don’t often head for the watercolors or the piano when we find ourselves up against something we oppose, to say nothing of the deeply disturbing or even horrifying. Not every problem lends itself to the elevated response, though memories of Vera Lytovchenko playing her violin in that Ukranian cellar as bombs dropped overhead remain clear in my mind.

I often think the gap in our speaking about and for justice, or working for justice, is that we forget to advocate for what we love, for what we find beautiful and necessary. We are good at fighting, but imagining, and holding in one’s imagination what is wonderful and to be adored and preserved and exalted is harder for us, it seems.

Ross Gay, in conversation with Krista Tippett

I only know that when I come across this kind of elevated, transcendent response, I’m so deeply moved, so indelibly touched by what’s possible, for the human spirit, for our world and our future. Art can do this, as it so often has, reminding us of what we’re made of, the stuff of stars.  

Do you, though? Do you have to explain? Right now?

Vital, irreplaceable energy is expended in the act of explaining, and especially so in explaining too soon. Canadian author and painter Robert Genn observes: Your own words can steal the thunder of your idea more easily than the negativity of others. 

The rush and even a palpable urgency to get fresh creative work out on social media, to invite everyone into one’s own creative process as it’s on its way to becoming, has been the unquestioned standard practice for some time. Artists well-served by this approach describe the generous climate of community afforded by IG and other creative platforms, along with the warm feelings of support found in these spaces where it’s become possible, in Lynda Barry’s words, to do this thing alone together. Too, there’s the tactical, instructional, information-sharing supports made readily available, i.e. How do I protect my watercolor paintings from UV damage? And the exposure and reach for sharing one’s creative work with the world has been a game-changer on virtually every front.

I’m less convinced, though, that the press to be public, especially in the early stages of the creative process, serves all makers. I know of a number of practicing artists, and have read about many more, who go to almost any length to protect that precious arena of initial creative incubation, that private domain of curiosity and imagination that these makers feel is best inhabited alone. 

We’re all hungry hunters, active participants in this mysterious, astonishing life, all of us hard-wired to be captured by enchanting curiosities, to find ourselves irresistibly drawn to those singular mysteries and fascinations that hold as-yet-not-fully-understood significance for us. We find ourselves drawn though we’re not always sure why at the start. An enlivening process in its own right, this inner summons for some of us needs protection now, in a noisy world that can place greater importance on influencing and collecting followers than that more vital task of following one’s inner creative Northstar.

We live in a time of the dissected soul, the immediate disclosure: our thoughts, imaginings and longings exposed to the light much too early and too often; our best qualities squeezed too soon into a world already awash with ideas that oppress our sense of self and our sense of others. What is real is almost always, to begin with, hidden, and does not want to be understood by the part of our mind that mistakenly thinks it knows what is happening. What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence. 

~ David Whyte, in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

The energy, vitality, and aliveness that propels the very forces of nature come to life within us, too, made accessible through the quietest of curiosities, these “infinitesimal specks of the celestial,” as Anne Lamott describes them, these “quiet miracles,” John O’Donohue notes, “that call no attention to themselves,” if only we’re awake enough to notice, to feel that irresistible fascination, to sense that deep pull and then to follow, all of which can happen in the quietest of ways, far from the madding crowd.

If I succeed in avoiding the hungry, glistening square eye of the phone for at least the first portion of a day, my thoughts feel unhurried, more gentle, more structured, smoother at the edges and more weighted towards the useful, the interesting, the productive, the creative-without-conflict, the settled sort of dreaming. I like the thoughts and ideas I have if I have steered clear of Other People’s Thoughts—how can a person end up anywhere personal and centered first thing in the morning if they’ve listened or read or scrolled at high speed past a thousand stranger-thoughts before they’ve even had a moment to think a single one of their own?

~ Ella Frances Sanders

These curiosities and their invitation to listen closely and then to follow, are the calling card of the true self, the uncurated self that in these moments of activated fascination and wonderment neither can nor cares to trade the impending adventure for any sort of obligation as to what one’s followers may want. 

True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources.

~ Wendell Berry

Heeding the call of one’s own true self is the quintessential followership worth preserving at any cost. Yet how can we attend to the call of the true self against a backdrop that favors the followers—What do the followers want?

In what is perhaps the human version of the Heisenberg Principle, we change a bit, and sometimes dramatically, when we’re being watched, as compared to the unmitigated freedom afforded by those places and spaces in which we’re alone, really alone, without the burden of having to prematurely share any thoughts or instructions, without having to do any sort of persuasion or convincing.

When the followers want what your own true self wants, you’ve landed on the sweet spot, the zone, you’re in the flow, on your way. Too often, though, following the followers can lead too many too far from home.

There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.

~ Howard Thurman

In a world filled with influencers, there’s only one who’s worthy of full possession of you.

We can ignore the call of the soul and still have a fulfilling life, or we can heed its wisdom and experience times of deep joy and contentment. While we go through that process, home remains, whether in our hearts or in reality, the place of security and nurturance necessary for our psyche. It remains the envelope into which we retreat for privacy and intimacy, which reflects who we are as individuals and as members of society; that is essential for our well-being. But it may not be enough. The garden may beckon us also, or the wilderness, the ocean, the landscape, wildlife. We must heed that call too, for deep within it, the soul is asking for attention.

~ Claire Cooper Marcus, House as a Mirror of Self

It happened last month. I’d gotten flowers from my husband for our anniversary, a crisp collection of crimson, ochre, and cinnamon blooms surrounded by russet-colored oak leaves, seed pods and assorted greenery. Captivated by the autumn flowers and foliage, inhaling deeply, fingering the seeded eucalyptus and the golden mums, I found myself, and I know this sounds strange, seized by an inexplicable urge to jump into the vase. For a few fleeting moments, I could feel myself nestled in the warm company of those sunflowers, lilies, and what I thought was a decorative wooden fan but later learned was a large, glorious dried mushroom.  Almost as soon as it arrived, my Alice in Wonderland fantasy faded and so I carried the vase outside and sketched the bouquet in all its radiant glory, backlit by the sun.

Can you remember the last time you were seized by beauty? Stopped in your tracks by the colors, the textures, the scents and the sounds? Compelled to touch, to really look, to know with your nose? Intoxications like these, to borrow Beryl Markam’s words, feels like extra life. Do you remember autumns as a kid, captured by the reds and golds against a cloudless chilled-blue sky, rolling in crisp umber leaves, the crunch so close to your ears, that earthy smell, pulling leaves out of the collar of your coat? It occurs to me that my looking glass fantasy was most likely my own body remembering some of those early immersions into fall, into life, and longing for them still.

Attention generates wonder, which generates more attention and more joy. Paying attention to the more-than-human world doesn’t lead only to amazement; it leads also to acknowledgement of pain.

~Robin Wall Kimmerer

What seizes me most, though, about the particular beauty of autumn is that I succumb to it again and again with fully-informed consent, knowing all the while that this splendor will end, and almost always before I’m ready. I began this post a month ago and already the crimsons have dimmed, same for the ambers and saffrons, imperceptibly at first, but there’s now a fuller fading underway that won’t stop until the whole scene is one muted brushstroke of cool, uneventful gray.  That beauty fades, though, only magnifies the urgency of surrendering to loveliness now, what Brian Eno refers to as The Big Here and The Long Now. Why should the certainty of an end dilute by even a single drop our willingness to be captured and enlivened, even ignited, by beauty? If Dostoyevski is right, our world will be saved by it.

Nobody Cares

Nobody cares if you stop here. You can

look for hours, gaze out over the forest.

And the sounds are yours, too–take away

how the wind either whispers or begins to

get ambitious. If you let the silence of

afternoon pool around you, that serenity

may last a long time, and you can take it

along. A slant sun, mornings or evenings,

will deepen the canyons, and you can carry away

that purple, how it gathers and fades for hours.

This whole world is yours, you know. You can

breathe it and think about it and dream it after this

wherever you go. It’s alright. Nobody cares.

~William Stafford