Autumn Bloom

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Summer’s End
• Autumn Rose
• Autumn: Season of Transformation and Surrender
• O Sacred Season of Autumn
• The Landscape Is a Mirror

Image: Michael J. Bayly.

Summer’s End

Here in the northern hemisphere, it is the last day of summer. Tomorrow ushers in the season of autumn.

There is a first morning frost in the forecast, and for days now the air has been cooling, the flowers fading, and the leaves beginning to turn.

I spent the past weekend with friends at Pelican Lake RV Resort, where there were some very poignant signs of this time of transition and loss; this time of transformation.

I share this evening images of these signs of change, along with the words of Cliff Séruntine on the deeper significance – the magic and mystery – of this change.

September: Time of the darkening equinox, the balance between sun and shadow. Full of the magic of change – not always a comfortable magic. Its twilight empties the heart of its mortal dream. Yet, September is not a bleak month, but a time of transformation. There is no dream as fair as the host rushing “twixt night and day,” a symbol of the continuance of life in the Otherworld. This is the Celtic spiral of life – death and rebirth. This balance . . . it is the mystery of [this] time.

– Cliff Séruntine

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Pelican Lake (2021)
• Pelican Lake (2016)
• Late Summer Blooms
• Autumn Rose
• Photo of the Day – September 22, 2016
• Autumn: Season of Transformation and Surrender
• O Sacred Season of Autumn
• The Landscape Is a Mirror

Images: Michael J. Bayly and Angela Hanson Shores.

“Better Than Callas We Will Never See”

It is not true that I am impulsive and capricious. It is true that I have my exigencies, and how I do. But not for myself, only in order to reach the goal to which I have dedicated my existence: to perpetuate the noble art of grand opera.

– Maria Callas

Today, September 16, 2021, is the 44th anniversary of the death of American-born Greek opera singer Maria Callas (1923-1977).

Here at The Wild Reed I commemorate Callas and her artistic legacy with a special compilation of images and quotes. Enjoy!

If Callas had been merely a technically brilliant singer, endowed with the voice of an angel – “merely” is perhaps not the right word here – she would take her place in the annuls of opera, and only in those of opera, as an interesting and provocative interpreter. As it is she has also aroused imagination, curiosity, love of sensation, and affection as well as the hatred of those who did not want their experience of opera influenced, let alone changed. In a deeper sense she has become an artistic figure of quite a different kind, one over which passions did, and continue to, ignite.

– Jürgen Kesting
Excerpted from Maria Callas
Northeastern University Press, 1990
p. 4

Maria Callas empowered the nightingale [roles of opera, i.e. the bel canto roles] with a strength and depth of feeling nobody had thought to offer them in modern times. She gave them credibility as drama. And the supreme, showpiece vehicle for what she could do was Bellini’s Norma: her greatest role, which she officially recorded twice and sang on stage no less than 84 times.

– Michael White
Excerpted from “Callas: A Life for Sale”
via The Wild Reed
September 16, 2013

Maria was Tosca [above] every second of the performance. The way she moved and sang, the way she listened to colleagues when they sang. She filled dramatic pauses with her presence, her ability to sustain tension. She was genuine, authentic, without the old clichés. Better than Callas we will never see.

– Tito Gobbi
Quoted in Gerald Fitzgerald’s essay, “The Great Years”
in Callas (by John Ardoin and Gerald Fitzgerald)
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974
p. 213

I worship Callas because she made mistakes, and because she seemed to value expressivity over loveliness. We don’t believe in nature anymore, but Callas put forth the effect of nature as opposed to the appearance of order, and offered an acceptable, digestible anarchy, a set of sounds on the verge of chaos – but enjoyably so. Here lay the danger, the lure: she was a mess and she was a goddess.

Her voice gave evidence of long attempts to domesticate the unacceptable. Recording producer Walter Legge commented that in her muted middle range she sounded as if she were singing into a bottle. . . . Enjoying Callas’s muffed voice, one declared affinity with hidden things.

– Wayne Koestenbaum
Excerpted from “The Callas Cult”
in The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality,
and the Mystery of Desire
Vintage Books, 1993
pp. 136-137

Callas’s mid-range was characterized by a covered or “hooded” quality which puzzled or annoyed listeners. Vocal buffs in post-war years were accustomed to a clear bright (“Italian”) tone in the middle register, and this “veil” in Callas’s equipment prompted one critic to observe that it sometimes sounded as if the voice were produced from inside a bottle. Another would mention “the curious inward sound of the singing – as if to herself.”

Others, myself among them, found this tone mysteriously beautiful and phosphorescent. Callas would use this special quality (often imitated today) to produce unforgettable dramatic and musical strokes [as in La traviata, above]. By means of those strange disembodied sounds, “ghost tones” as I call them, she could convey a state of mind or spiritual affliction. This coloration pervaded Callas's conception of Lucia, particularly in the heroine’s most troubled or private moments; it also made the floating morendo effects in Violetta’s death scene particularly poignant, adding to the total atmosphere the soprano meant to achieve.

– Bruce J. Saxon
Excerpted from “Maria Callas: Soprano Assoluta” (1977)
at MariaCallasMuseum.org

How can we fittingly remember Callas? We can recall the musician who re-shaped the operatic canon, revealing the musical and dramatic integrity of works (by Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and others) once dismissed as mindless showpieces for canary-like singers. We can think of the artist who, in upholding the ideals of dramma per musica, drew to the opera house directors from the so-called “legitimate” theatre, crossly informing one such colleague who demurred, “I don’t want opera directors. I want directors.” Granted, there remain pockets of provincialism (New York, for example) where opera is seen as a concert in costume. . . . Most everywhere else, though, Callas’s example continues to shape what audiences see and hear. . . . Finally, we can remember the awkward little girl with a wayward voice who, through unsparing hard work, became an artist whose musicianship, glamour, and quest for dramatic truth transfix music lovers even now, some [fifty] years after her last appearances in opera.

– Marion Lignana Rosenberg
Excerpted from “Re-Visioning Callas”
USItalia
December 2003

The following video is of Maria Callas singing “Vissi d’Arte” (“I lived for art”) from Puccini’s Tosca at Covent Garden in 1964.

I lived for art, I lived for love,
I never hurt a soul!
. . . Always with sincere faith
I gave flowers to the altar.
In this hour of pain,
Why? Why, Lord?
Why do you pay me back like this?

For more of Maria Callas at The Wild Reed, see:
• Remembering Maria . . . Celebrating Callas
• Maria by Callas: “Revelatory, Unprecedented, and Authoritative”
• Re-Visioning Callas
• Remembering Callas
• Callas Went Away
• Maria Callas – “Ava Maria”
• Callas Remembered
• The Impossible Desire of Pier Paolo Pasolini
• Europe 2005 – Part 6: Paris

Your Peace Is With Me, Beloved One

The following is an adaptation of Lesson 245 of A Course in Miracles – Volume II: Workbook for Students.

The original text uses the metaphor of father for the Divine Presence. I use the metaphor of lover as expressed in the phrase “Beloved One.” As with the previous adaptation I shared, if this one resonates with you, feel free to make it even more meaningful by using your preferred images and words: “God,” “Allah,” “Lord,” “Jesus,” “Holy One,” “Mother.” I trust that they all serve as different pathways leading up the same holy mountain or, to use another metaphor, different gateways leading inwards to our center, the deepest part of which we all share. For as Henri Nouwen so beautifully reminds us: “In the depths of my being, I meet my fellow humans with whom I share [all things].”

Your peace is with me, Beloved One. I am safe.

Your peace surrounds me, Beloved One. Yes, wherever I go, it is there with me.

Your peace sheds its light on everyone I meet. I bring it to the desolate and lonely and afraid. I give Your peace to those who suffer pain or grieve for loss or feel bereft of hope and happiness. Guide them to me, Beloved One. Let me bring Your peace with me.

And so we journey on. With You beside me I radiate to all the world, through my actions of body, speech and mind, Your transforming peace, the Voice of Love.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Meeting (and Embodying) the Lover God
• The Soul’s Beloved
• Be Just In My Heart
• Beloved and Antlered
• “Here I Am”
• Sometimes I Wonder . . .
• Vessels of the Holy
• No Altar More Sacred
• To Be Held and to Hold
• An Erotic Encounter with the Divine
• Spirituality and the Gay Experience
• The Holy Pleasure of Intimacy
• The Many Manifestations of God’s Loving Embrace
• Prayer of the Week – July 6, 2010
• Clarity and Hope
• Cultivating Stillness
• Cultivating Peace
• Andrew Harvey on Radical, Divine Passion in Action
• Ahmad Joudeh: Dancing for Peace
• Guidelines for the Advent of a Universal Mysticism

Images: Calvin Royal III.

Photo of the Day

Related Off-site Link:
Our Soaking Rains Are Easing Drought Across Much of Minnesota – Paul Huttner (MPR News, September 3, 2021).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Photo of the Day – November 9, 2017
• Photo of the Day – June 13, 2012
• Photo of the Day – July 12, 2010

Image: Michael J. Bayly.

Be in My Mind, Beloved One

The following is an adaptation of Lessons 232 and 233 of A Course in Miracles – Volume II: Workbook for Students.

The original texts used the metaphor of father for the Divine Presence. I use the metaphor of lover as expressed in the phrase “Beloved One.” If this prayer/reflection resonates with you, feel free to make it even more meaningful by using your preferred images and words: “God,” “Allah,” “Lord,” “Jesus,” “Holy One,” “Mother.” I trust that they all serve as different pathways leading up the same holy mountain or, to use another metaphor, different gateways leading inwards to our center, the deepest part of which we all share. For as Henri Nouwen so beautifully reminds us: “In the depths of my being, I meet my fellow humans with whom I share [all things].”

Be in my mind, Beloved One, when I wake, and shine on me throughout the day today. Let every minute be a time in which I dwell in You. And let me not forget my hourly thanksgiving that You have remained with me and will always be there to hear my call and answer me.

Beloved One, I give You all my thoughts today and ask that You give me Yours. I give You all my actions as well, that I may do Your will instead of seeking goals which cannot be obtained and wasting time with illusions. Be my guide today. May I be open to Your love, the tenderness of which I cannot fully comprehend but which is Your perfect gift to me.

As evening comes, let all my thoughts be still of You and of Your love, and let me sleep sure of my safety, certain of Your care, and happily aware that I am Your Beloved One.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Be Just In My Heart
• Meeting (and Embodying) the Lover God
• The Soul’s Beloved
• Beloved and Antlered
• Sometimes I Wonder . . .
• Vessels of the Holy
• No Altar More Sacred
• To Be Held and to Hold
• An Erotic Encounter with the Divine
• Spirituality and the Gay Experience
• The Holy Pleasure of Intimacy
• The Many Manifestations of God’s Loving Embrace

Image: Paulo Pascoal (photographed by Francisco Martins).

Photo of the Day

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Cultivating Stillness
• Robert Farrer Capon on the Power of the Loving Eye
• Mystical Participation

Image: Michael J. Bayly.

COVID Observations From a General Surgeon

Dr. Jeffrey Dietzenbach is a general surgeon at The Iowa Clinic. He shared the following observations on Facebook last Wednesday, August 25. He prefaced his post with these words: "This is my first Facebook post ever, I hope I’m doing this right! Also, I am not an expert on COVID-19 or infectious disease."

_________________

This pandemic has been long, difficult, polarizing, historical, exasperating, and confusing. I can complain about it . . . but not that much. I have had no loved ones or close friends who have become extremely sick or died from this virus. I personally have not contracted this virus. As a general surgeon, the only care I have had to administer to a COVID-positive patient is the occasional appendectomy or gallbladder removal. I’ve been lucky enough to not have to spend countless hours in the ICU managing ventilators and medical care. Those healthcare providers are the real heroes.

One thing that has really perplexed me throughout this whole pandemic, though, is the lack of humility. Namely, the lack of humility when it comes to expert opinion.

I like to travel. Do I get on the tarmac and inspect the mechanics of the plane or discuss the flight plan with the pilot or tower? Nope. I’m not an expert in that. I have the humility and faith that those people are experts and will get me where I need to be safely.

I like a nice yard. Do I tell my lawn care company how much nitrogen and weed-control to use? Nope. I don’t have the time to devote to learn about that. I’ll leave it up to the lawn care expert.

I hope I never get sued. Would I defend myself in court with a total lack of legal knowledge? Nope. I’ll leave that up to the legal experts.

When my car needs to be fixed, do I tell the mechanic how to repair it? Nope. I know nothing about auto repair.

Do I walk around talking about COVID-19 and vaccinations and posting constantly about it? Nope, I’m not an infectious disease doctor or a pulmonologist/critical care doctor.

I get it. Frustration about closing schools and businesses, social distancing, limiting travel, using masks, etc. is understandable. The benefit and philosophy behind some of these things are not black and white. The thing I don’t understand is this distrust of expert healthcare providers and lack of humility.

Biostatistics is not easy.

True research (not just looking through Google and social media) and reviewing data and studies and articles is not easy.

Believe me, as a General Surgery Program Director, we hold six journal clubs a year reviewing the most recent surgical literature. I have the humility to know that I am not a statistician and by no means an expert in this field.

You can find an “expert” on COVID-19 anywhere. Online, at work, at the dinner table, on MSN or Fox News, and especially on social media. I find it interesting that there are lots and lots of infectious disease specialists and pulmonologists across this planet and I don’t recall any of them suggesting anything that was counter to the most recent accepted best practices, based on the most updated information we had at that moment in time.

Yes, things change. The virus changes, data and statistics change, discoveries change and new information emerges. One thing that doesn’t change is the expertise of the scientists, infectious disease doctors and pulmonologists. I’m a doctor and I think I’m a pretty good one (one could even say an “expert” at surgery), but when it comes to my kids’ health, I’m going to follow my pediatrician’s recommendations. When it comes to a vaccine, I’m going to follow the generally accepted recommendations by the EXPERTS.

And . . . when I start to see brown spot on my lawn, I’m calling my lawn care guy.

Ask yourself how many times you put your life at risk by humbly and faithfully putting your trust in a person. Eating at a restaurant, walking over a grate on the sidewalk, taking an Uber, or for God’s sake going on a carnival ride at the Iowa State Fair! This doesn’t make you a “sheeple.” This happens all the time, every day.

All I’m asking for is a little humility and trust, not in me or this post, but in experts.

– Jeffrey Dietzenbach, MD
via Facebook
August 25, 2021

Related Off-site Links:
Virus Surge Breaks Hospital Records Amid Rising Toll on Kids – The Associated Press via Snopes (August 26, 2021).
As Adult ICU Patients Hit Record Highs for the Pandemic, New Report Shows Unvaccinated People Are More Than 15 Times More Likely to Die From COVID-19 Compared to Vaccinated People – NCDHHS.gov (August 27, 2021).
100,000 More COVID Deaths Seen Unless U.S. Changes Its Ways – Carla K. Johnson and Nicky Forster (The Associated Press, August 26, 2021).
COVID Vaccines Show No Signs of Harming Fertility or Sexual Function – Emily Willingham (Scientific America, August 24, 2021).
All of Minnesota Is Now a COVID-19 Hotspot – Shaymus McLaughlin (Bring Me the News, August 30, 2021).
The Troubled History Of Vaccines And Conflict Zones – Madeline Dexter (NPR News, August 29, 2021).
History Won’t Help Us Now: We Have No Historical Precedent for This Moment – Howard Markel (The Atlantic, August 19, 2021).
Unvaccinated COVID-19 Patients Strain Alabama Hospitals Amid Warning of “Potentially Apocalyptic” Crisis – Brett Wilkins (Common Dreams, August 19, 2021).
Alabama Hospitals Run Out of ICU Beds. Chaplain Says It's a Frightening Situation – A. Martinez (NPR News, August 20, 2021).
Minnesota ICU Beds Filling Again With COVID-19 Patients, Some From Out of State – Jeremy Olson (Star Tribune, August 20, 2021).
U.S. Hospitalizations of People Under 50 at Highest Levels Since Start of Pandemic – The Guardian (August 19, 2021).
As a Doctor in a COVID Unit, I’m Running Out of Compassion for the Unvaccinated. Get the Shot – Anita Sircar (Los Angeles Times, August 17, 2021).
As Covid-19 Cases Rise, Global Task Force Lays Out How to Avert Future Pandemics – Jessica Corbett (Common Dreams, August 14, 2021).
America’s Coronavirus Outbreak Is Now a Patchwork of Highly Vaccinated States and Pockets of the Raging Delta Variant – Barbara Miller (ABC News, August 15, 2021).
The Far Right’s Deadly Embrace of Anti-Vaccine Stupidity – John Feffer (Common Dreams, August 14, 2021).
How the Pandemic Now Ends – Ed Yong (The Atlantic, August 12, 2021).
What’s Driving Vaccine Denial? – Keith A. Reynolds (Medical Economics, August 10, 2021).
Angry at the Unvaccinated? Here’s a Better Way – Peter Bregman and Howard Jacobson (CNN Opinion, August 5, 2021).
How to Talk to Someone Who’s Hesitant to Get the COVID-19 Vaccine – Elaine K. Howley (U.S. News, May 12, 2021).

UPDATES: Surge of Unvaccinated COVID-19 Patients Straining Hospitals – Aya Elamroussi (CNN via WTOP News, September 12, 2021).
Unvaccinated COVID-19 Hospitalizations Cost Billions of Dollars – Krutika Amin and Cynthia Cox (Health System Tracker, December 22, 2021).


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Richard LaFortune: Quote of the Day – August 20, 2021
• Something to Lament
• A Pandemic Year
• Out and About – Spring 2020
• A Prayer in Times of a Pandemic
• The Calm Before the Storm
• Hope and Beauty in the Midst of the Global Coronavirus Pandemic
• Marianne Williamson: In the Midst of This “Heartbreaking” Pandemic, It’s Okay to Be Heartbroken
• Sonya Renee Taylor: Quote of the Day – April 18, 2020
• Examining the Link Between Destruction of Biodiversity and Emerging Infectious Diseases
• The Lancet Weighs-in on the Trump Administration's “Incoherent” Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic
• Memes of the Times

Mystical Participation

As with the writings of Jeff Foster and Andrew Stark that I’ve recently highlighted, the words I share today by author and psychologist Sharon Blackie speak to a deep part of me, and resonate as both timely and relevant.

In the excerpt I share below from Blackie’s 2018 book, The Enchanted Life: Unlocking the Magic of the Everyday, the concept of “mystical participation” (or participation mystique, as it was first defined by French philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl) is explored. It’s basically the idea that as humans connected in deep and intrinsic ways to the created world around us, we have the capacity to recognize and be in relationship with all kinds of natural realities and processes. In doing so, we can and often do, as Blackie puts it, “invest [these realities and processes] with a significance which goes well beyond their natural physical forms.”

Tragically, most people in the so-called “Western” world have lost touch with this capacity and thus their life-giving connection to nature, in large part because of the dominating and conquering mind-set inherent to both patriarchy and colonialism, and the consumerist mindset of industrialized capitalism. The capacity for mystical participation has, however, been consistently maintained through the centuries by many indigenous peoples across the globe.

That being said, many people in the “West” can and do experience “a sense of kinship with the world; a feeling of oneness, in the sense that we and the world and other creatures and objects in it are not really separate and fundamentally different from each other, but are merged in the same living system.” I’ve certainly had such experiences, and I can relate to how they have been described by psychologist Abraham Maslow as “rare, exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, exhilirating, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality, and are even mystic and magical in their effect.” Maslow termed these experiences of mystic oneness “peak experiences,” and noted that they can be triggered by our participation in and with art, nature, sex, creative work, and music. This all jives with my experience!

Indeed, I think I’ve always been in touch with my capacity for “mystical participation,” or as I prefer to say, mystical communion, though I also recognize that my awareness of such a capacity was definitely heightened when I experienced the film Picnic at Hanging Rock as a child. A similar awakening took place when, as an adolescent, I experienced the music of Kate Bush, music that, in the words of Martin Glover, nurtures and shines “light that defeats the dark forces that seek dominion over the natural world. . . . [Kate Bush] exemplifies English pagan beauty." (And remember, “paganism” is simply a name for the indigenous spiritualities of Europe.)

Anyway, with all this in heart and mind, I share the following from Sharon Blackie's The Enchanted Life. This excerpt is accompanied by samples of my photography which I feel reflect my openness to and capacity for mystical communion with the world, along with a powerful and related quote by author Karen Armstrong.

_______________________

In 1975, the Scottish poet Kathleen Raine wrote about an experience which her eighty-year-old mother once confided to her: an experience she had as a girl. “‘I have never told anyone before,’ she said, ‘but I think you will undertand.’ It was simply that, one day, sitting among the heather near Kielder, ‘I saw that the moor was alive.’”

Raine went on to describe a similar experience which she herself has, as she sat at her writing table one evening in front of the fire, looking at a hyacinth.

All was stilled. I was looking at the hyacinth, and as I gazed at the form of its petals and the strength of their curve as they open and curl back to reveal the mysterious flower-centres with their antlers and eye-like hearts, abruptly I found that I was no longer looking at it, but was it; a distinct, indescribable, but in no way vague, still less emotional, shift in consciousness into the plant itself. Or rather the plant and I were indistinguishable; as if the plant were a part of my consciousness. I dared scarely breathe, held in a kind of fine attention in which I could sense the very flow of life in the cells. I was not perceiving the flower but living it.

What Raine was describling is a sense of kinship with the world; a feeling of oneness, in the sense that we and the world and other creatures and objects in it are not really separate and fundamentally different from each other, but are merged in the same living system. Such moments of deep relationship have been described by mystics throughout the ages, but in 1964 the American psychologist Abraham Maslow secularised them and gave them a new name: he called them “peak experiences,” and described them as “rare, exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, exhilirating, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality, and are even mystic and magical in their effect.” According to Maslow’s early studies, peak experiences can be triggered by exposure to art, time spent in nature, sex, creative work, and listening to music.

Today, we see these experiences as remarkable and unique, because they occur rarely during each of our lifetimes; indeed, some people report never having had them at all. But when they happen they are always transformative, jolting us out of the everyday. leading us to see the world, and our place in it, in a very different way. Kathleen Raine wrote that when she returned to “ordinary reality” after her experience with the hyacinth, it was “as if I were experiencing at last things as they are, was where I belonged, where, in some sense, I had always been and would always be. That almost continuous sense of exile and incompleteness of experience whish is, I suppose, the average human state, was gone like a film from sight.”

They might be rare, transient experiences for us, but anthropologists have suggested that this way of perceiving the world once would have been the norm rather than the exception for all human beings, and that it still is the norm for many indigenous peoples around the world. It arises out of a belief not only that the world and objects in it are alive, just as we are – but more than that, they are capable of interacting with us. In contrast, in her remarkable novel Ceremony, Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko describes the way Westerners see the world:

They see no life.
When they look
they see only objects.
The world is a dead thing for them
and trees and the river are not alive
the mountains and stones are not alive.
The deer and bear are objects.
They see no life.
They fear.
They fear the world,
They destroy what they fear.
They fear themselves.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, French philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl used the term “participation mystique” – “mystical participation” – to describe the worldview of what he called “primitive peoples,” in contrast to the more logical, rational worldview of "civilised man." Participation, he wrote, is a belief that “mystical forces” which can’t be perceived by our physical senses are present in the world, and can somehow affect the world. Object can of course simply be themselves – a stone is very much a stone, and a stone is something we can act upon – we can pick it up, move it, use it to build a wall – but objects can also be something more. A stone could represent, for example, or in some sense be inhabited by, other powers and influences which are able to make themselves felt beyond the stone. And so the stone, or those powers and influences which the stone represents, can affect us, or act on us, just as we can act on the stone. In other words, the relationship isn’t just one way: it’s reciprocal.

Even here in the “modern” West, I think that many of us – whether we are aware of it or not, or would admit it publicly or not – still retain a residue of this aspect of participation mystique. I certainly do. I invest all kinds of objects with a significance which goes well beyond their natural physical forms. One of my most treasured possessions is the bright blue empty shell of the egg of a grey heron. My husband retrieved it from the floor of a heronry in the woods behind an old riverside cottage we once lived in, in Donegal. To me, this delicate and fragile shell is two things. First, it is at some level, quite simply, an exquiste sky-coloured egg: a rich reminder of the beauty that can so readily be found in the natural world. But second, it carries in it all the mystical power of the heron in my native Irish mythology. Heron is an edge-dweller, a stalker of riverbanks and lochsides, a walker-between-worlds who passes easily from water to land to air; she guards the entrance to the Otherworld. . . . Heron haunted my early morning walks along the river, and in many ways personified for me that magical green river valley where we spent three years of our lives. The shell, then, is essence-of-heron, essense-of-Otherworldly-guardian, essense-of-liminality, essense-of-the-cycle-of-birth-and-rebirth . . . it’s a magical object, something which, when I hold it (very carefully!) in my hand, conjures up a remarkable rich panoply of archetypal and mythical images which are overlaid onto the beauty of its natural form.

Is the eggshell, then, in my head, inhabited by “other powers and influences” which are able to make themselves felt beyond it? Yes, indeed.

Am I a “primitive” at heart? Perhaps I am. But my life is richer for it.

What is interesting here is that, in my understanding, indigenous people who subscribe to such a worldview don’t differentiate between the supernatural and the natural, the material and the spiritual, the self and the non-self. It’s all the same thing. To see the world in a participatory fashion is to refuse such dualism, to refuse to be separate from the world, to insist on always participating in it and with it, and with the other objects and forces which are present in it. It is also, at its heart, about seeing meaning in a stone, or in the discarded shell of a heron’s egg.

Some scholars have argued that this state of participation is indeed primitive, because it’s nothing more than anthropomorphism – in other words, people who live like this are really just projecting human qualities onto other objects and processes in the world, mostly because they are naive, or lacking in proper understanding. According to this perspective, you can’t look at a participatory approach to the world as a form of consciousness which happens to be different from ours, but which is equally legitimate – instead, you should see it as a misguided and unsophisticated worldview that most of us in the West have, happily and rather cleverly, now outgrown.

But other writers and thinkrs have suggested that participation mystique might be rather more sophisticated than that: people in such indigenous societies might really see other objects and processes as genuine, autonomous presences which are part of the same life-world we inhabit, and which are capable of interacting with us. Maybe they see something we don’t. Maybe stones, rivers and storms are alive, just as people are alive, and maybe all things in the world can have relationships with other things. For example, when asked how they have come so perfectly to understand the medicinal uses of plants without the benefits either of randomised or double-bind clinical analyses in the laboratory, most indigenous people will patiently try to explain themselves to Westerners using some version of the words, “The plants told us.” Why then shouldn’t a woman drift for a while into the consciousness of a hyacinth?

– Sharon Blackie
Excerpted from The Enchanted Life:
Unlocking the Magic of the Everyday
September Publishing, 2018
pp. 47-50

The earliest mythologies taught people to see through the tangible world to a reality that seemed to embody something else. But this required no leap of faith, because at this stage there seemed to be no metaphysical gulf between the sacred and the profane. When these early people looked at a stone, they did not see an inert, unpromising rock. It embodied strength, permanence, solidity and an absolute mode of being that was quite different from the vulnerable human state. Its very otherness made it holy. A stone was a common hierophany – revelation of the sacred – in the ancient world. . . . Trees, stones and heavenly bodies were never objects of worship in themselves but were revered because they were epiphanies of a hidden force that could be seen powerfully at work in all natural phenomena, giving people intimations of another, more potent reality.

– Karen Armstron
Excerpted from A Short History of Myth
Canongate, 2006

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• A Sacred Pause
• Aligning With the Living Light
• In the Garden of Spirituality – Rod Cameron
• Boorganna (Part II)
• Robert Farrer Capon on the Power of the Loving Eye
• “I Caught a Glimpse of a God . . .”
• Cosmic Connection
• The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
• The Mysticism of Trees
• Holy Encounters Where Two Worlds Meet
• The Landscape Is a Mirror
• November Musings
• “Our Bodies Are Part of the Cosmos . . .”
• Thomas Moore on the Circling of Nature as the Best Way to Find Our Substance
• Autumn's “Wordless Message”
• “This Autumn Land Is Dreaming”
• Celebrating the “Color of Spring” . . . and a Cosmic Notion of the Christ
• Guidelines for the Advent of a Universal Mysticism
• No Other Time, No Other Place
• The Prayer Tree
• The Most Sacred and Simple Mystery of All

Images: Michael J. Bayly.

Somehow, Somewhere

Thinking of you on your birthday, Mahad, and sending you energies of love and healing. . . . I am grateful for the times we got to spend together and know we'll see each other again – somehow, somewhere.

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Christmas 2020: A Time of Loss and Grief, Gratitude and Hope
• Moments of Wonder

• Time By the River
• A Longing and a Prayer
• Now Is the Time
• You Will Know It
• Something
• Ride to Sundown
• Meeting Truth
• Out and About – Spring 2018
• Out and About – Summer 2018
• Out and About – Autumn 2018
• Autumn . . . Within and Beyond
• Out and About – Winter 2018-2019
• Winter . . . Within and Beyond
• Out and About – Autumn 2020
• Guidelines for the Advent of a Universal Mysticism
• The Prayer Tree

Opening image: Mahad – August 31, 2018. (Photo: Michael J. Bayly)