I really appreciated this dialogue between yourself and Jena. It chimes with thoughts I have and it is good to see these so well expressed. I also believe that one way forward is through telling/sharing/showing our personal experiences, as they become authentic connections with others’ different experience and so we co-evolve. I particilarly liked:
I began to recognise that language makes a lot of these conversations difficult. When you say that you prefer to think of the universe as ‘magical’, I love the idea of it being ’slippery’ and ‘queer’! And, as you point out, we can mean radically different things when we use words like ‘consciousness’ and ‘soul’.
… and
...the falling away of ‘meaning’…
"Radical Acceptance" is now in my vocabulary and I should also say I like the sense of ordinary that was somewhere in the conversation, we are far too intellectual too often!
Thanks Elspeth. I really appreciate your reflection on this. I realise that radical acceptance itself is language open to interpretation!! For me it's a kind of phenomenological 'being with' - even if the thing we're with is suffering. But it's not just acceptance. I guess it's about taking a position inside the thing that is. Standing up for the slippery, queer world, even as it's always changing and slipping away!! Do you know Timothy Morton's dialogue with Bjork? It's wonderful: "...and that might become the sub theme of our little quest: slippery-hand-reaches-even-slippery-tail". That line has become a bit of a manifesto for me... and it feels apt to thinking about my Mum dying - everything dying really....
I enjoyed reading this dialogue. It left me thinking that sometimes we find ourselves in search of a unifying theory or overarching narrative, and sometime we just don't.
When my mother-in-law, Helen, died we were gathered in the living room. We popped in and out of the bedroom next door. At the start of the vigil she said a few occasional words, not very clear. Mostly she slept. Over the hours, her breathing grew slower and shallower then stopped. She was a small woman and we noticed how death made her immediately smaller. Something was gone. I thought of the film '21 grams' - in the film the weight of the soul. She was a few days short of 103. Her life had narrowed down and narrowed down. She was ready to go, and then she was gone.
I'm looking through glass doors into my small patio garden. The blue geranium and the pink geranium flowers are dancing and sparkling. The grasses are waving. The holm oak that forms the backdrop is swaying in the wind. And that's it really. Just bathing in it. Just allowing the beauty. Just being here.
I really appreciated this dialogue between yourself and Jena. It chimes with thoughts I have and it is good to see these so well expressed. I also believe that one way forward is through telling/sharing/showing our personal experiences, as they become authentic connections with others’ different experience and so we co-evolve. I particilarly liked:
I began to recognise that language makes a lot of these conversations difficult. When you say that you prefer to think of the universe as ‘magical’, I love the idea of it being ’slippery’ and ‘queer’! And, as you point out, we can mean radically different things when we use words like ‘consciousness’ and ‘soul’.
… and
...the falling away of ‘meaning’…
"Radical Acceptance" is now in my vocabulary and I should also say I like the sense of ordinary that was somewhere in the conversation, we are far too intellectual too often!
Thanks Elspeth
Thanks Elspeth. I really appreciate your reflection on this. I realise that radical acceptance itself is language open to interpretation!! For me it's a kind of phenomenological 'being with' - even if the thing we're with is suffering. But it's not just acceptance. I guess it's about taking a position inside the thing that is. Standing up for the slippery, queer world, even as it's always changing and slipping away!! Do you know Timothy Morton's dialogue with Bjork? It's wonderful: "...and that might become the sub theme of our little quest: slippery-hand-reaches-even-slippery-tail". That line has become a bit of a manifesto for me... and it feels apt to thinking about my Mum dying - everything dying really....
https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/gallery/20196/0/bjork-s-letters-with-timothy-morton
I enjoyed reading this dialogue. It left me thinking that sometimes we find ourselves in search of a unifying theory or overarching narrative, and sometime we just don't.
When my mother-in-law, Helen, died we were gathered in the living room. We popped in and out of the bedroom next door. At the start of the vigil she said a few occasional words, not very clear. Mostly she slept. Over the hours, her breathing grew slower and shallower then stopped. She was a small woman and we noticed how death made her immediately smaller. Something was gone. I thought of the film '21 grams' - in the film the weight of the soul. She was a few days short of 103. Her life had narrowed down and narrowed down. She was ready to go, and then she was gone.
I'm looking through glass doors into my small patio garden. The blue geranium and the pink geranium flowers are dancing and sparkling. The grasses are waving. The holm oak that forms the backdrop is swaying in the wind. And that's it really. Just bathing in it. Just allowing the beauty. Just being here.
Beautiful, Maggie... xx