[Image: “Something Caught My Eye (and My Eye Caught It Back),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

Like many people, I think — at least, many people of a certain age — a lot of what I have always believed came to me through books and other reading. (My computer’s been carrying around a scanned copy of an old Smokey Stover cartoon for months now, just waiting for me to recognize the right occasion to spring it on the world.) Many of those beliefs were simply absorbed, without question, and in many cases I can even remember (i.e., think I remember) where or when or in what source I first encountered their expression.

So it is with “Namaste” — rather, with what “namaste” quote-unquote “means.”

I’m pretty sure I know which book told me that Namaste, especially when spoken with hands raised prayerfully before the speaker, translates to English as “I salute the light within you.” (I won’t share the title or author with you here, because I’m not positive I got it from that book.) It seems, though, that Namaste means nothing of the sort — that it means nothing more than “Hello.”

For what it’s worth, I just plugged the word into Google Translate, which offers Greetings! — including the exclamation point — as the literal meaning.

Now, from a certain hippy-dippy perspective, we could say that any greeting, in acknowledging the presence of someone else, salutes the light within them — salutes something within them, anyhow. A heartfelt Hello!, Howdy, ‘Morning!, etc., especially with the right facial expression and maybe a hug, says much more than I see and recognize you. It says I know some things about your inner self and they’re things which please me. So, yeah, I guess they’re all “saluting the light within [someone].” Even so, it’s a stretch to go from that hippy-dippy perspective to assert a literal translation.

Literal translations aside, there’s value in sometimes peeking beneath the surface even of strangers — even, especially, beneath the surface of the strangest of strangers: the surface of ourselves. We’re always in the process of remaking our “selves,” papering over unpleasant memories, inflating perfectly pleasant little balloons of flattery into the unsustainable blimp we call “praise,” retrofitting past sins in the camouflage of virtue, reworking limp verbal banter into dialogue worthy of Elmore Leonard or the Mark Brothers. But there’s other stuff buried deep inside — whether buried by the sheer weight of multiple self-delusions, or by simple forgetfulness… It’s a wonder we recognize ourselves at all.

And so we come to a couple of readings from the week, which touch on rediscovering or re-acknowledging something — light or otherwise — within us. We start, as usual, with a post from whiskey river‘s recent stream of consciousness:

I want to avoid preaching at you but I do want to convince you that the true and durable path into and through experience involves being true to the actual givens of your lives. True to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge. Because oddly enough, it is that intimate, deeply personal knowledge that links us most vitally and keeps us most reliably connected to one another.

And you will be sure to keep going in life on a far steadier keel and with far more radiant individuality if you navigate by that principle.

(Seamus Heaney [source])

And then, not from whiskey river but in the same spirit of lifting up the corner to peek below:

Raft

At the said-to-be bottomless pond
at the sand pit, the raft we discovered
was a heavy barn door, maybe ten feet
by twelve, halfway in, halfway out
of the water where others had left it,
probably older boys, always the first
to find something good, use it a while,
then leave it for us, Billy and Larry,
Danny and me, floating it out onto
the water, wading in after it, holding
onto its edge as we slid down the slope
up to our shoulders, then one by one
helped each other climb on, soaked
and shivering, standing to balance,
arms spread, each to a corner, facing
each other, frightened but laughing,
not a forethought among us for a pole
to push out with, nor a plank for an oar,
as we trusted that door as it floated
not on but just under the surface,
one corner sinking, then slowly lifting
as another went down, ankle deep
over the cold, bottomless darkness.
Seventy years later, I still feel that door
sinking under my weight, can still see
the white faces of Larry and Billy
and Danny looking across into mine
as we held our arms wide, as if to keep
some wild, free, invisible creature
there at the center from running away,
and at eighty I know what it was.

(Ted Kooser [source])

…and/or, in a lighter vein:

Chris has always fantasized about being the sort of man who might buy the red, yellow, and green peppers. The sort of man who would buy broccoli or ginger or beetroot out of choice. To Chris, the fruit and veg aisle at the supermarket was where he bought bananas and occasionally a bag of spinach to put at the top of his basket in case he bumped into anyone he knew. People always look into your basket, don’t they? Chris wanted to pretend he shopped and ate like a grown man. Slip the Kit-Kats under the spinach and no one’s any the wiser.

Chris thinks back to the day a cashier in Tesco’s was scanning his shopping. As she swiped through the chocolate, the crisps, the Diet Coke, the sausage rolls, she had looked up with a kind smile and said, “What is it, dear, a child’s birthday party?” Chris has used self-service checkouts ever since.

(Richard Osman [source])