I am making time to create the right questions to ask my Self. Giving full attention to big, ‘Why am I here?’, ‘What am I here to do?’ sort of questions.
It isn’t a mid-life crisis. It is more akin to Joseph Campbell’s suggestion: how I feel we, as a society, are right here and right now.
“Our life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where the hell you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is required of you.”
Taking myself away from the day-to-day into woods, the waters edge of rivers and the sea, sitting under trees or walking aimlessly in nature has been the richest space in which to just be. Campbell describes this as ‘sacred space’. “A space for uninterrupted reflection and unrushed creative work.”
In that space I notice. Silence for example. Unrelated events, things I have read and seen. An alignment of floating thoughts, which begin to form as yet unrecognizable but somehow familiar shapes.
Sitting for as long as I can, as quietly as I can. Emptying out.
In the natural environment it has become clear to me how much I value it, and feel deeply bound and connected to it.
I have been diving deeply into words which restore.
In Divine Beauty, John O’Donohue writes:
“…the beauty of the Earth is the first beauty. Millions of years before us the earth lived in wild elegance. Landscape is the first-born of creation. Sculpted with huge patience over millennia, landscape has enormous diversity of shape, presence and memory. There is poignancy in beholding the beauty of landscape: often it feels as though it has been waiting for centuries for the recognition and witness of the human eye. In the ninth Duino Elegy, Rilke says:
Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit tree, window...
To say them more intensely than the Things themselves
Ever dreamed of existing."
Reading these words, thinking deeply and listening, learning to “recognize your own depth”, as Campbell says, is the start of a process which feels as though questions, really good questions are beginning to take shape. That is the process.
I’m not waiting for the complete formation of the questions, as I want to feel the movement in my thinking. I want to be deeply in the questioning.
Open-hearted, deep thinking and looking gives space for beauty to reveal itself. Maybe it creates a reverence, or a state of awe, which allows things to be seen. To be seen as they truly are.
With thanks to Ewan Townhead.