Open
#1000Steps: Leica Q2
“There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.”
(Leonard Cohen)
Just for a moment, sunlight pierces our lives.
As our world creaks and cracks, it can feel like an oppressive blanket has been thrown darkly over us. So I’m working on noticing moments of potential; the little glimpses that light up my days and offer the possibility of difference and change.
It’s clear that our ways of living and working in the world are having consequences we can no longer sustain and that the challenges we face are predominately man-made. We are victims of both our success and our inability recognise the complex, long-term changes that slowly move across our planet, through our communities and into each fibre of who and how we are.
But if our understanding is insufficient for the conditions we face, we need to realise its limitations rather than abandon it. The progress brought by science and technology has served us well and our task now is to find deeper, more expansive ways of knowing and being in our world.
As I work with dialogue and imagery, listening for the unheard dynamics in conversations, opening eyes to the possibility new vistas, I know that the space for helpful disturbance can be astonishingly small. We simply don’t see or hear anything that isn’t offered within our established, habitual ways of knowing and responding to events.
Isadora Duncan famously said, ‘If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it’ and invited us to consider ways of coming to know our experience that stretched beyond the logical, analytical and reductionist.
So, if we can pay attention to the gentle glimmers of faint light shining through the cracks in our world, we might discover other ways of knowing it; ways that are tacit, implicit, felt, sensed, participative, poetic and imaginal.
Which might also illuminate a personal practice and inquiry for each of us. How do we learn to live alongside differing views, sit with conflict and disconfirming information as we imagine alternative ways of being in the world?
How do we crack ourselves open and let sunlight into our lives?
Notes:
Take a few moments with Leonard Cohen and this rendition of ‘Anthem’: ‘Ring the bells that still can ring…’
In ‘Composing a Life’, Mary Catherine Bateson opens her chapter ‘Opening to the World’ by noting that ‘Human beings tend to regard the conventions of their own societies as natural, often sacred.’ She later concludes with the observation that, ‘… there is a possibility that the real winners in a rapidly changing world will be those who are open to alternatives and able to respect and value those who are different. These winners do not require that others become losers.’
Finally, I’ve enjoyed revisiting Brian Goodwin’s Nature’s Due: Healing Our Fragmented Culture. He tells us that ‘To Live is to know; to be human is to love.’ His section on ‘Science with Qualities’ finishes with the idea that ‘Love holds open all the diverse possibilities for participation and creative action by members of the community, whatever it may be. No-one is isolated or invalidated. Diversity of perspective is acknowledged and valued and conflict provides energy for transformation and resolution.’
See Also:
Fall
Autumn is my favourite season.
Life becomes more intense; it’s ‘sweater weather’ and the contrast between cool mornings and midday warmth brings me to life. There is a joyful sensuality in the gentle ‘almost-rain’ that softly refreshes then, slowly, utterly drenches…. (more…)
