Space to Sing

Space to Sing

What is the most perfect music?

Silence.

~ Sting

And with this quote to tickle our muses, I began a poetry and spoken word workshop with three young women at London's Eastside Educational Trust.

For me, poetry must have at least four ingredients:

- words

- silence

- music

- soul

The teens at the workshop had words, music and soul in abundance. So I worked on giving their poems plenty of silence to breathe - and space to sing.

Silence and space are often overlooked in music and poetry. But the places where we draw breath, pause, and look into the listeners' eyes, is for me the essence of poetry - its quiet heart that our words must honour.

At the same time, poetry's living music is also essential. So I asked the girls to write me a poem starting with this line from Rumi: 

"We have fallen into the place where everything is music."

Here are their creations:

Rashana

We have fallen in the place
where everything is music.

From the beat of your chest,
to the oceans and the seas -

waves of mood-setters
playing that magnificent tune.

Speaking to you, calling out to you -

from behind the shadows
of the trees,

down to the last grain of sand -

blares that burning
sweet melody,

fluorescent in all its beauty
and glory.

Tides are put to rest in disbelief.

Carmen

We have fallen
into the place

where everything
is music.

Music affects the soul
in ways that a surgeon

never could,

and it gathers space
for a new sound

to complete the orchestra,

along the road 

we call “life.”

Silence is
the loudest beat

in a symphony.

Hannah


We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.

The rushing of wind mixes
with people’s meaningless chatter.

The beating of birds’ wings mingles
with the sea’s angry movements.

As I lie here I imagine
the rapid beats of my heart

sending trembles
through the ground.

Fear and passion all in one.

But, above it all, an unheard silence
lingers in the air.

Like a mystical ghost,
an unwanted stranger.

Now, stop and listen.

Light #2

Light #2

Diaspora (n): 

1876, from Greek, diaspora "dispersion," 

from diaspeirein "to scatter about, disperse,"

from dia- "about, across" + speirein "to scatter" (see sprout).

~

In Jewish mysticism, it is said that when God was pouring the first light into the vessels he made to contain it, the light was so hot, the vessels broke.

The light broke too and scattered across the face of the earth, waiting for humans to gather it and make it whole again.

I feel there is a strange connection between breaking, scattering and restoration.

I love the idea that it is only through our cracks and imperfections that the inner light can seep through.

I read a beautiful poem by Christian Wiman recently on the On Being blog called "Every Riven Thing". As the poet explains, riven means "broken, sundered, torn apart".

And that's the mystery. Because within our brokenness, inside our marrow - is the first light that was scattered, just waiting for us to recognize it, and gather it up.

This light is "in us" but not "of us" - in many ways it is:

"The Other, who reveals where you'll go

next. The stranger who should be welcome

in your home, for stranger may also be god."

~ Ruth Padel

So again, there is this paradox - between god and stranger, between what is sacred and what is feared/rejected/reviled. Our challenge is to welcome this fear (or ourselves, mainly) - and then to expose its divinity.

I think the trick is to learn to see ourselves as something remarkable and foreign rather than familiar and banal. And I think we learn see ourselves clearly by travelling.

We read books, listen to music from new places. We spread ourselves across different countries, houses, jobs, relationships. And in this scattering - diaspora - we sow a trail of seeds fed by "the warmth of other suns" (Isabel Wilkerson).

And it is, finally, these other suns that are in us too, filling our narrow bones with wonder - and finally, quietly, with recognition.

I see you

beneath the trees

unafraid of the darkness falling

- a lucid braille -

translating your body 

into light.

Uncertainty Principle

Uncertainty Principle

"It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man."

~ Richard P. Feynman, Physicist

Humans are not comfortable with uncertainty. We like certitude, definition, direction.

Otherwise we feel like an unobserved photon of light - neither particle nor wave. 

Or perhaps both. 

I'm trying to enjoy my time as a photon, dodging direct observation, slipping between cultures and continents. 

The more I get to know London, the more I feel it is the Capital of Uncertainty, home to the (literal and metaphoric) homeless who are increasingly a global norm.

If you're like me, you hesitate when people ask "Where are you from?" or "What do you do?" I mean, how can there be one, simple answer to those labyrinthine questions!

For a small but growing band of professionals, there are simply no models out there for what we want to do. 

We are not (unlike many university departments) "interdisciplinary" in name only. We are connectors and integrators to the core. 

We gulp down knowledge from diverse sources, synthesize it, then spit out this spidersilk braid of different theories and paradigms - which, I believe, will one day be incredibly useful in pulling the world out of the deep pit into which it (or some of it at least) has fallen.

I think a lot of uncertainty stems from the fact that the entire world has entered uncharted waters, virgin territory. The old models don't work, and we don't have a firm enough grip on what the new ones should look like.

Yet there is a pioneering edge to this unknowingness. An edge of inventiveness and creativity that many people are beginning to explore.

But you still have people who look askance when you say, "Well, I have degrees in International Relations, Public Policy, Education and Philosophy - but I'm really interested in journalism right now. Also literacy and migration..."

Are you a dilettante? Some people wonder. Or just another example of one of those poor, lost kids who dabble in this and that before settling down to a nice stable job in accounting.

No! I want to shout. All these young people searching for themselves and their "calling" are not, generally speaking, self-absorbed (or at least, like most of us, only mildly so).

Because having a calling means answering a need, a need only you can fill. And you find that need by going deep down to the roots of your tree, where the little grubs and leaf moulds live, and finding that - goodness! - you actually are connected to this strange, wandering spacerock we call home. 

You discover that your head may be up in the stars, but your feet are fed by subterranean seas...

Being neither animal nor angel, neither atom nor cosmos, humans are paradoxes, bundles of contradictions.

But once we begin to make peace with ourselves as "between worlds", there is tremendous potential to be found.

For me, it's the tension between opposites that sparks originality and progress.

"Peace on earth" will not come when everyone looks and acts the same. Homogeneity creates weakness and disease - like crop monocultures that are highly susceptible to blights that can cause entire population collapse.

Hybrids are hardier and healthier (sorry for the alliteration), and usually much more interesting.

But hybrids are also harder to label, define, and stuff into pre-existing boxes.

So it comes back to uncertainty again - to being comfortable with new forms of life and work that may defy easy definition.

I like to think of uncertainty as the creative principle that underlies our universe.

In fact, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is one of the cornerstones of quantum mechanics - and therefore describes what's really going on "beneath the surface" of the physical world.

It basically states that the more precisely you measure a particle's speed, the less you can know about its location, and vice versa.

For me, the Uncertainty Principle is how the universe manages to be both measurable and mysterious at once.

At the subatomic level, the universe is just fluid enough to slip through our fingers when we reach out to grasp it.

It's the universe saying, "You can know this much, but no more..."

As physicist and historian Jacob Bronowski said, "The Principle of Uncertainty or, in my phrase, the Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited."

So it reminds us to be humble. 

It also reminds us to be alive.

Because for me, it's this fundamental uncertainty that is the secret engine of growth and evolution. It's what makes the universe expand.

It's what Emily Dickinson meant when she said, "Dwell in possibility."

Because uncertainty is just another name for possibility, for the freedom inherent in each speck of light, to choose where it's going - and how fast it will get there.

Vanishing Point

Vanishing Point

I had actually completed this entry, was on the verge of posting it, when I accidentally erased everything I'd written. So I've been staring at this blank page trying to reconstruct the "gems of wisdom" I had just finished polishing.

And then the irony struck me. This entry was supposed to be about the soul and the paradox of finding ourselves by losing ourselves, and my theory of how this works.

I called the entry "vanishing point" - which is a term for the spot on the horizon where two parallel lines seem to converge.

I have this idea that the human soul is such a point - a vanishing point in the self through which we experience other people, the world, the universe.

And then, just as I was getting carried away by the loveliness of this image - Poof! My words vanished.

I've been sitting here trying to wrest some lesson out of my frustration, and what I keep coming back to is: detachment. 

For weeks I've been feeling the need to exert all my energies and, through sheer strength of will, simply FORCE life's doors to open. I've been editing and honing and tweaking and basically obsessing over every step I make out into the world - little things like opening a Twitter account, publishing this website, applying for a job.

It just made me realise how our need for control binds us ever tighter to ourselves, in a destructive, self-referential loop. It seems that true progress can only come once we've let ourselves go, accepted our flaws, made peace with the fact that going out into the world means sometimes being wrong, getting hurt.

But how to do this? Accepting imperfection is all well and good in theory, but we are constantly bombarded by ideals, whether on the cover of magazines or in the pages of religious texts. How to accept necessary imperfection, while at the same time striving to be truer, kinder, wiser?


Obviously I don't have any answers (this blog is about questions after all), but I do think some clues lie in the idea I started out with: that of the soul as the vanishing point of the self.

For me, it's a relief to think that there is some small pinprick in me that is not-me. I don't know what it is exactly. All I know is that when I'm squeezing myself into some ideal mould of who I think I should be, this little place of not-me refuses to be squeezed. 


Like a doorway, it retains its integrity and offers me a glimpse of a world beyond myself, a world that needs me to just get on with the task at hand - with honesty yes, but not perfection.


And that tiny glimpse is all I need to square my shoulders, take a deep breath, and walk on.

The Door

The Door

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern."

~ William Blake*

After a few days of very random, jet-lagged sleep, I finally managed to wake at six today, though my mind was troubled with thoughts of finding work, purpose, a place at the table, etc. After tossing around a bit, I got up, put my iPod on shuffle and was about to start sending emails when the first strains of pure human voice released my tightly wound synapses.

It was the sound of Gregorian chant, something, to be honest, I enjoy but don't listen to much, especially in this fast-paced world when I feel the need for something, well, more thumpin'.

But the purity and precision of the notes pierced the layers of worry and reminded me that the answers I'm seeking already exist within me, waiting only for the right question to be asked, for the right door that opens only at the touch of my key.

But - the skeptic in me insists - does such a door exist? And if it does, is there just one or many? One job I am meant to do, or a dozen? One soul mate, or a hundred potential partners?

I like the idea quantum physics gives us of potential. Subatomic particles like electrons exist, before they are observed by an instrument, in a state of possibility - neither particle nor wave, and at the same time both. In the quantum world, there may be many dimensions, many worlds in which our life paths change depending on a single different decision.

But once that decision is made, once that door is opened and the threshold crossed, there is no going back. Your world is changed and your path suddenly crystallizes. Possibility becomes reality, and a thousand options merge into the life you are living now - the only life, if you are both wise and fortunate, you can imagine yourself living.

If you are someone like me, someone who agonizes over finding just the right door, this seems like a decision waaaaaay above my pay grade. 

And yet, the funny thing is, the more trust you have in yourself, the more confidence you have in your own competence, the more your likelihood of right living is ensured. For there may be a million "right doors", yet once you step over just one of those thresholds, it becomes the only right way, the only career or partner you both need and want.

Friends are always telling me "if it's meant to be, it will be," and while I detest platitudes, there is a grain of truth to this cliche. If something is "meant" to be, it is intentional, not passive. And I feel, in the great life stories, there is this wonderful alchemy between active intention and luck, chance or serendipity.

The trick, I guess, is to be firm in your hopes and goals while remaining open to those chance meetings and opportunities that are unplanned but somehow exactly what you need. Because, as much as we search "out there" for it, the door we are looking for, the one that opens out onto the entire universe, is the one hidden deep inside our hearts, waiting only for us to ask: "Now where did I put that darn key?"

(*Author's Note: This Blake quotation was the inspiration for Huxley's drug-laced memoir "The Doors of Perception." I am using the quote without this connotation.)