Be Sceptical of the Quick Route
Underneath a motorway there was once a road, underneath the road there was a lane, underneath the lane there was a track and underneath the track there was once an animal path. Hoof prints under the concrete. It is the animal path that wants to walk you back into the ready receivership of contact with your own soul. Very, very little in this book is encouraging the allure of the swift.
There’s not much in today’s more audacious predicaments that doesn’t grumble around the pathological desire to get anywhere as quickly as possible. It would be an extraordinary act of will and beauty to check that in ourselves. To question it. Not with pious, judgemental intent, but with a desire to remember the sheer worth of things. Part of the insidious and growing meaningless many experience is the fact that speed is not bringing substance. Its very ease derails us from the capacity to understand the process of making. A woven bag, a diligently apportioned novel, the tanning of a hide, these things really take time. Long after the initial euphoria of the task has gone.
There’s something akin to a tantrum in many of us when we don’t get what we are accustomed to, immediately. There’s a clue in that. Tantrums are for toddlers, not adults. That finger-snapping routine is a childish mode, not befitting someone who is cooked in the presence of much that has fallen away.
At the risk of undue simplicity, this very impetus has got to be behind the incessant castration of the earth. A blight on multitasking. There, I said it.
Be aware that the hour is late. Much is falling away. And that anything still alive in these enormous transitions is shouting to everything else that may possibly be alive. Mythologies are commingling and attempting to reform at lightning speed. And that though many stories are place-specific, some stories have a migratory agency and are designed to travel. They need to be welcomed. Ponder what are the home-making skills required to welcome such a story? The story will likely be powerful, disorientated and requiring shelter. Amongst all the plastic and garbage the sea is washing up, things are arriving on our shore that we desperately need to know about. These are not usually mythologies arriving, but fragments, little broken-off stories, potent but propelled into their own kind of liminality rather than resting in the wider den of an established mythos. We have no idea if they will wither or flourish, but quiet attention is a gift we could give them. See what it wants to say. Some call this a Hermes era, due to the speed of communication, but there is a specific tone to journeys of the winged god: he communicates from soul to soul. If the soul is not open, then Hermes is not present. Remove the flowers and the bee is taskless. We have information aplenty, but do we have meaning? Though it may not be quite clear yet, in the barrage of statistics and general bad news, these stories bring fragments of meaning in troubled times. Like Psyche, we can separate out the grains of their insight in the half-light.
Rescue the Third Thing
Strange as it may seem, couples planning to marry sometimes come to me for advice. I tell them to go study a magpie together, and not to return till they’ve figured out why I’ve asked them to do this. This is usually the last I see of them. But for the ones who do return, they always bring the same insight: that amongst the black and white feathers they glimpsed a blue feather. For a couple to survive in the pressure cooker of the home, a third position is vital to the warring polemics that comes in any argument. That we make a nest for a possibility that is more than just right and wrong. To take myth seriously we need a blue-feather language. That’s what it can offer us. The immense sophistication of its images will tune conversations to a far deeper dimension than the steady drill of statistical misfortune or hand-wringing guilt. Myth is a shield within whose reflection we can view Medusa. If we keep staring head-on into the abyss, we will have not artfulness but burnout. Much nimble language has simply been thrown away in the search for soundbites; let’s rescue it. Neruda is needed in the House of Commons.
So attend to what isn’t getting said in a conversation. Listen for the absence and speak to it. It will not fail you. It may not be comfortable, but so little of what’s good for us is.
