Startled by a Glimpse of the Invisible

[Image: “Family Portraits IX,” one of a series by the photographic team known as Inka & Niclas (Inka and Niclas Lindergård). The series comprises what might be otherwise conventional natural-landscape/family-portrait photos (sometimes with their children, as here). The difference: the human subjects were dressed in full-body reflective garb, and illuminated with strobe lights in such a way as to minimize the effect of the lighting on their surroundings. Some, like this one, were taken in dark settings; others, in broad daylight. Overall, the photos simultaneously haunt and disquiet — bleached-out cousins of the human figures graven, in 1945, on the walls at Hiroshima.]

From whiskey river:

Funeral Music
(excerpt)

8.

Not as we are but as we must appear,
Contractual ghosts of pity; not as we
Desire life but as they would have us live,
Set apart in timeless colloquy.
So it is required; so we bear witness,
Despite ourselves, to what is beyond us,
Each distant sphere of harmony forever
Poised, unanswerable. If it is without
Consequence when we vaunt and suffer, or
If it is not, all echoes are the same
In such eternity. Then tell me, love,
How that should comfort us — or anyone
Dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place,
Crying to the end ‘I have not finished’.

(Geoffrey Hill [source])

…and:

At a certain point we need to grow up; we need to look inside ourselves for our inner guidance. There are things most human beings know; they just don’t want to know them. They know deep down that certain things in their lives are working or aren’t working, that certain parts of their lives are functional and others are dysfunctional. But sometimes, as human beings, we don’t want to know what’s not convenient. So we pretend not to know.

(Adyashanti [source])

…and, from whiskey river‘s commonplace book:

What’s Not Here

I start out on this road, call it
love or emptiness. I only know what’s

not here: resentment seeds, back-
scratching greed, worrying about out-

come, fear of people. When a bird gets
free, it doesn’t go back for remnants

left on the bottom of the cage! Close
by, I’m rain. Far off, a cloud of fire.

I seem restless, but I am deeply at ease.
Branches tremble; the roots are still.

I am a universe in a handful of dirt,
whole when totally demolished. Talk

about choices does not apply to me.
While intelligence considers options,

I am somewhere lost in the wind.

(Jelaluddin Rumi [source])

…and (in slightly different words):

The easiest way of illuminating this term [“grades of significance”] is by means of a classic example of the diverse responses and grade of significance that an object may elicit. For example, an animal may see an oddly shaped black and white object, a tribal person a rectangular flexible object with curious markings. To a Western child it is a book, while to an adult it may be a particular type of book, namely a book that makes incomprehensible, even ridiculous claims about reality. Finally, to a physicist, it may be a profound text on quantum physics…

What this example so nicely demonstrates is that when we cannot comprehend higher levels of significance, we can blithely believe that we have fully understood something whose true significance we have completely missed. As Schumacher pointed out:

…All levels of significance up to the adequate level, i.e., up to the level of meaning in the example of the book, are equally factual, equally logical, equally objective, but not equally real… When the level of the knower is not adequate to the level (or the grade of significance) of the object of knowledge, the result is not factual error but something much more serious: an inadequate and impoverished view of reality.

This raises an arresting question: What higher levels of significance, what profound meanings and messages, does the world give us that we are overlooking?

(Helen Palmer [source])

Not from whiskey river:

“There was this bear cam”

There was this bear cam
on the Internet. It was pointed at a place
called Katmai National Park, Alaska. A few years ago
my friend sent me a link to it.
I would watch it sometimes
but I never saw any bears.
Maybe it was bad luck
because my friend said she saw bears.
All I ever saw was the enormous river rushing
and the tall pines in the background doing nothing.
I mean, that was OK, of course.
I loved the sound of the river
and wind in trees and the sheer thrill
that such a sublime nothingness
could be witnessed like this.

But I wanted to see a bear.
It seemed even more thrilling to be typing
in a cubicle and suddenly out of nowhere
there’s a bear on your screen
that maybe 50 other people in the world catch
a glimpse of. Maybe they are on a break from Facebook
or filling out a spreadsheet and BOOM, a bear.

So I thought while I was writing this
that I would just check the bear cam online
and sure enough a fat bear is in the middle of the river
eating a salmon right there in the Katmai National Park.
I get up from my desk and tell my colleagues
“You guys, come here!” and my colleagues
come in my office but by the time they run in
the bear crosses the river, or pixelated
screen or whatever, salmon in his jaws
and the only thing there is the river
and trees and they say,
“Sandra, this is boring,” and walk
back to their own offices.

(Sandra Simonds [source])

…and:

Feasting

Bitaug, Siquijor, Philippines

Three women dragged the spiky, bulky mass
onto a bamboo table on the side of an island

road. A raised hunting knife glinted in sunlight,
then plunged with a breathless gasp, slicing into

the unseen. To a passerby they were a curious
wall, a swarm of onlookers, barrio children

and younger women, buzzing with a rising
gleeful cadence as a mother busied herself

with the butchering. Surprisingly, a citrusy,
sugary scent sweetened the stranger’s face

when offered the yellow flesh like thickened
petals, licorice to the touch, he stood awed

at the monstrous jackfruit, bloodless armadillo
halved, quartered, sectioned off for feasting.

His tongue tingled ripely. This country’s foreign
to me, he continued, but I’m not foreign to it.

(Joseph O. Legaspi [source])

…and:

…the indigenous mind does not admit impossibility. It defines itself by not rejecting the unfamiliar, and it therefore thrives on mysteries and magic. Such a mind gives ample space to the invisible because the invisible holds the key to the wisdom of the universe.

Eventually such awareness becomes an honoring of the shadowy and hidden parts of ourselves, those parts of ourselves that are invisible. There is such a thing as a spirit person and physical person, and more often than not the physical being is so detached from the spirit that one feels split inside. Awareness should ultimately lead to an attempt to bring these parts of the person together to become one.

(Malidoma Patrice Somé [source])