My wife Marian and I have just returned from an awesome holiday in Norway. The glacier walk was demanding but exhilarating. The more strikingly memorable scene that returns repeatedly to my mind, however, is of utter peace and stillness. It settles my heart as I recall that side valley of Sognefjord where we stayed for several days in a cabin near the water’s edge near Balestrand. Its deeply scooped out glacial valley brings millennia of slowly changing history into the equally scooped out retinae of my connection into this world, breathing as I do imperceptibly in this grand scale of movement that we call nature.
In the tops, when the clouds clear, above the forests and waterfalls are the summer snow fields around the glacial edges. At the waterline across the fjord is a narrow beaded string of diminutive houses and barns that marks the proportion of human influence in this awesome scale of life. While humbling, there is also the heroism of presence.
I had been reading Tara Westover’s autobiography ‘Educated’, a deeply moving story about the way we fill nature with our stories, and how those stories and myths evolve as we learn and broaden our horizons. But here I am being brought back repeatedly in my heart and mind to the experience of peace deeper and more enduring than all the traumas that would mar and scarify life. In the Chapter ‘Apache women’ Tara pens how the choices we all make shape our futures, numberless accumulating choices, like grains of sand that layer and compress, and coalesce into sediment, then into rock, until all is set in stone. But by the end the potential is released to renew and reshape life, hard though it may be.
Sitting on the cabin’s veranda in the palpable silence and stillness, not even an engine’s sound disturbs the presence of life’s potential everywhere. I am reminded of several mornings years before on our boat anchored in hidden inlets along the South Devon coast when the mist rises in the dawn of light and warmth. In the distance, beyond vision, the sound of a small outboard motor moving a dinghy slowly through the smooth morning surface can be received as an intrusion, or it can be heard as its own poetry, of vibration radiating its own story of movement and hope, of stories upon stories of how this journey came to be so real and present and heart-filling.
I write this reflective letter having returned from Norway, and having picked up the threads of stories unfinished before we left. This included listening to a recorded talk I missed by Arabella Thaïs, given to the Galileo Commission of Scientific and Medical Network, for the Consciousness Perspectives Forum. Arabella’s vision is powerful, of the new paradigm shift from materialism into the unknown nondualism, where science and philosophy and artistic aesthetics interweave a rediscovery, the Renaissance yet again, of the creative life that fills and renews all. Her talk was entitled, ‘Depth Cosmology: Poetics and Physics of the One Cosmic Mind’. The poetry is the point. The medium is the message in this new physics – a vibrational view of the life in which we participate, exploring meaning, making meaning from our unique perspectives. The Q&A session brought some fascinating moments of insight, in particular from a man who made an unfortunate comment about material causality which brought a vigorous response from Arabella, that her cosmology had no place for material causality, only poetic causality.
My heart and mind did a flip at that point, visually and somatically recalling the fjord’s stillness, and the anchorages we had rested among. And then I heard the outboard motor.
I recalled how pressure on aerated diesel is needed to ignite its explosive potential into internally motivated movement, into a life of sorts with less potential than human embodiment. A million choices in the supply chain from sunlight on prehistoric forest through extraction, distillation and distribution into the many forms making an outboard motor, all of which show now in the present depths of movements on a misty morning as a neighbour from a distant anchorage casts off from his boat in the dinghy and lazily sets out for a shore with a purpose in heart and mind.
Science and philosophy and aesthetics meet in how we receive that vibrational wave from the dinghy’s bow slowly rolling as a wake across the surface, with its energising stern of intentionality. There is poetry in internal combustion. All material is poetic and perhaps even sacred in this new vibrational paradigm in which we dwell and rest. It has its history and stories.
