The magic of the senses
'The world is wholly inside of me, and I am wholly outside of myself' - Merleu-Ponty
Dear friends,
I am threading my way along a path at the edge of a dense forest, where the singing birds flutter and glide among dense weaves of spiky aloes, spreading tree boughs and curling tendrils. Light streams in through gaps in the branches. Breathing slowly in and out, I am in the flow of life. My eyes and ears are wide open. I breathe out, taking it all in — not entirely sure where the boundary of ‘self’ that is me meets this infinite world beyond. I am reminded of a phrase from the philosopher of phenomenology Maurice Merleu-Ponty: ‘The world is wholly inside me, and I am wholly outside of myself.’
I am so immersed in being part of this larger whole that I really do feel wholly outside of myself for a moment. I feel a heightened sense of clarity and keenness as I catch the slender, golden sheen of spiders threads reverberating through the shafts of sunlight. For a moment, I feel utterly absorbed in the shared, invisible, universal language of impulse towards life. It is a riotous, multi-hued, multisensory language of interbeing. I am fully interwoven with the spider, the web, the clouds, the rocks, the soil and the tree branches through breath, hands, body, mind and spirit. My footsteps sculpt new possibilities I will never perceive.
Feeling the strong pulse of inspiration, I pull out my notebook to write down a poem. And then, the spell dissolves. My mind is empty and the world has gone flat. I lower my pen, sighing heavily. All of it has been said and done before. My language feels dead, effete, absurd. My thoughts and feelings and questions are all worn out. The wellsprings run dry. I am separate once more, back inside the hamster wheel of my own mind.
At first, I am astonished. I realise I have come to take it for granted that a solitary walk through the forest will restore me back to wonder. But with the urge to produce, to extract something from the process, the magic vanished — just like that. I sit down on a rock, and let the fullness of my fatigue and disheartenment wash over me. And after a while, a story comes. It is a story I heard from another storyteller, Maria Serrano. I recorded myself telling the story, and you can listen here:
Or if you prefer it in brief text: it is a magical tale of a young man, in a small village I imagine somewhere in Andalusia. At the hottest time of day, he stumbles outside to sit beneath an old olive tree shading the bank of a thin trickle of river. Sitting against the tree by the river, the young man is in despair — the thought turning over and over in his mind that there is nothing in his life worth living for.
His meditation of despair is interrupted as a woman rides up to him on the back of a smiling white horse. Hearing his despondency, she offers to trade him a large pile of gold — in exchange for one of his senses!
Still sitting beneath the olive tree, the young man takes the afternoon to think it over. At first, he imagines that it hardly matters which sense he gives up. There is enough gold in that pile to make him a rich man for the rest of his days! But as his back rests against that olive tree, a slow kind of medicine begins to work in his mind. The medicine of immersion in life. As I imagine it, he feels the ancient trunk of the tree holding and supporting him, and remembers the joy of being alive in his body. For the first time, his mind feels a faint spark of hope.
As the afternoon passes in contemplation, his mind wavers back and forth between hope and despair, joy and bitterness. There is a gradual process of reawakening to the treasures of his life and remembering the joys and delights experienced through his body-mind’s capacities of touch, smell, taste, hearing and sight. He remembers the fragrance of the orange blossoms wafting through the valley in springtime, and the convivial aroma of chestnuts roasting over the fire during winter. He delights in the thought of fresh sardines frying in garlic, and listens to the music of the stream wending on its journey to meet the sea.
I won’t spoil the ending for you (click above to have a listen if you like). Instead I’d like to share with you what I take from this story, enriched through my encounter that day with the forest. As we know, part of the beauty of stories is that they reflect the liminality of our lives, that we are always journeying somewhere. Each person will interpret a story in their own unique way, drawing from their own particular perspective. Each of us may see different things in the story and find our own particular meaning in it that speaks to what we are needing and longing for at that moment. Perhaps a story may give us a fresh perspective on a difficult relationships or a problem we are facing.
As I worked with the story this time around, the following interpretation sprang to my mind, prompted also by a magical insight that I came across from Tyson Yunkaporta in his wonderful book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. He writes:
‘Mind and memory are real things although they can’t be touched, measured, proven, or even seen. They exist, but not only in your brain. They extend out, to your body, to the land and your relations. Your mind is infinite and extends as far as your attention and love can go.’
In the story, the young man experiences a reawakening of mind and memory, prompted by the return of his sensory awareness. In his awakening, he is reminded (literally re-minded) of the love and attention his mind carries. Mind and memory, as faculties for making meaning, carry the potential to extend our lives to infinite dimensions, as Yunkaporta observes.
But it is through the immediacy of the senses — the feel of his back resting against the trunk of the old oak tree, the faint stirring of the breeze on his skin and the quiet music of the river — that the flows of energy and aliveness are restored in him so that he is able to access these faculties of memory and mind once more. With his mind and senses dulled by despair, the young man’s life has become stagnant and he has lost hope. He has become deaf to the music of the river. Perhaps he has been living too much inside of a narrative of separation. But as the connections of mind and memory are revived, he gradually re-enters the flow of life. Only then can he see that the pile of gold he is offered is a shimmering mirage, representing only the illusion of wealth. True wealth lies in the rich interwoven relationships and connections that sustain his life and and make it worth living.
With this insight, I return to my own moment in the forest, just before the unexpected gift of the story arrived in my mind. In that moment of picking up pen and paper to extract a poem, I lost my sense of connection with and immersion in the whole. I had gone to the forest because I was tired and in need of rejuvenation. And in that moment of disconnection and reductionism, I discovered that I had cut myself off from the very source of healing and connection that I needed. Until the story came to me and offered me a way back to a fuller and more connected state of being. As the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us, ‘To be means to InterBe.’
This week, I am reminding myself of the vast and full flow of life. You don’t have to travel far to ‘nature’ to be part of it — all you need is some contact with the living. Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us that when we gaze at a simple flower, we see a whole living universe of relationships in which we are interwoven:
‘When you look deeply into the flower like this you have the impression that the flower is full of everything. There is sunshine inside. There is the cloud inside. There is the Earth, the minerals. Even our consciousness is in the flower. Time and space. Everything. It looks like everything in the cosmos has come together in order to help the flower manifest as a wonder. So the fact is that the flower is full of the cosmos.’
And so are we. As beings of the infinite universe, with stardust in our bones, we always have the possibility of stretching ourselves to see more of the living process and to participate in it more fully. It is easy to forget this in our productivity-obsessed culture. But if we can open ourselves just a little and allow our senses to be awakened and our minds to tune into the vast and infinite living world, I believe we can always find our way back into the full flow of life.
With love,
Megan
I love this beautiful essay, Megan, so evocatively written. I have practiced with Thich Nhat Hanh and I too resonate with his inter-being teachings.