When one begins contemplating whether to share their anomalous experiences publicly, there are a number of questions it is wise to ask and answer prior to sharing. The first question is, of course, Should I? And there is no right answer to this question, as it is deeply personal and private for each person. But to those who are enthusiastic to open up and share, I strongly suggest caution and patience, for there are risks in such sharing that may not be immediately obvious, especially if blinded by the desire to reach outside of oneself in an attempt to find validation, understanding, or peace of mind.
Here I sit alone, nowhere to take my longing but an empty page, no one to hold my crashing head, filled with memories this Cosmos craves constantly to claw away — half in love with her and half with the profound conveyance of easeful Death.
For weeks I’ve been circling, collecting my courage, doubting my voice, hinting at what has been, hiding what truly is. To put into words what is most important perhaps supersedes the most cautious and sensible of thoughts, and the fears of wounding and being misunderstood. But it is an illusion to believe silence can be a shield or protection, for silence itself is a frightening invitation to self-destruction, however counterintuitive that may seem.
There are occasions when I sit down to journal, and my mind goes blank, and this is one of those moments when my head is a logjam of thoughts, memories, and a myriad of other things that have yet to be sorted, categorized, questioned, reasoned, tested, processed, and so on. I think this is the mind’s way of signaling overwhelm, and I’ll heed the warning, floating among the floundering detritus, neither pushing nor pulling.
What is love? What are its ingredients? What is its formula for success? These are questions that have inspired scholars and philosophers alike, motivating some of the greatest human creative achievements and masterpieces, from Dante to Shakespeare, from Cohen to Cave. My contribution here is only a tiny contemplation, one among an endless line of such contemplations, from the start to the end of humanity — a drop of rain in the wandering river of life.
I was perusing John French’s 1650 English translation of a text by Michael Sendivogius and found a tale of a poor alchemist who was visited once in a dream by an old man, and then spends his days trying to initiate another visit.
I find that fatigue and cynicism seem to go hand in hand. They appear as twins, showing up together when you least expect them, though their appearance isn’t necessarily surprising, but always unwelcome.
Upon rereading A place I cannot yet go, I noticed my framing through the use of the word yet. Such a small but profound word. Yet is not soon. Soon measures distance on a clock, the ticks that jump from second to second, as if time were some supreme mechanism ticking toward an appointed hour. But time is less a matter of gearworks than of celestial motion, bodies turning in relation to one another — souls intertwined despite and because of their geometry. Yet asserts not when but where, a place behind a door that only one key can open, and that key belongs to a particular hand.
In one of the birds’ speeches from The Conference of the Birds, an excuse is offered for not undertaking the journey to the Simorgh, where the bird highlighted in the passage below is not wrong about rubies — about the life therein — but wrong about his reason for stopping there.
Finding authenticity between the stagecraft and theology of 18th century Western alchemy
A short dialogue buried in an 18th-century German alchemical anthology, Wasserstein der Weisen ('The Water-Stone of the Wise'), reprinted in 1743 and traditionally attributed to Johann Siebmacher, begins like a domestic quarrel. Nature appears as a central female power figure, speaking through a name other than the author's, and she arrives on scene with quite the temper. She calls the seeker a fantastical fool and a coarse ass who breaks glassware and burns coal until the fumes cloud his head (p. 118). Every other creature does its office faithfully, she complains, and only man, presuming to take up hers, strays from it (p. 120). For a text about sacred secrets, the opening is strangely familiar — not the voice of an oracle, but of someone who has been misunderstood one too many times.