Fractals and flowers
...and kaleidoscopic dis-integration.
‘Over certainty and single-mindedness irritate as well as bore; the idea that one can know what is right, or that a general truth is possible, affronts the complexity of the real.’
Jane Hirshfield
In the presence of a claim to rightness these days, I experience an embodied loss of trust in the speaker, a sense of being squeezed out of dialogue and spiralling possibilities in favour of containment. It’s not fear exactly, maybe so, but it’s a level of reactivity I could manage better. Perhaps it’s something I see in myself.
Being right is something I know well, learned and strived for as an indication of self-worth. This is still ‘a part’ that shows up to defend and offer misplaced expertise to prove my worth, when my role is more often to stay in not knowing, letting go and listening deeply to a frequency barely audible, and made mute if I’m searching through vaults of ‘cleverness.’
This ‘part’ is a familiar presence. She’s about 11 years old, holding onto a stack of books, standing in a school corridor, a grey bank of lockers to her left, looking up at me like a shadow, needing to be seen and heard. For a while I’ve tried to wave her aside as an irritant from the past, but of course, she needs love and acceptance and I need her too.
A skilled coach reminds me that she’s here for me, if I have the patience to know her, so together, in conversation, we transform her role. Today she’s with me, not reaching for answers, but reminding me of my love of learning - the wonder of unlatched excitement when a new connection is made and imagination spools. Seeing her now, her environment is different. She’s in a library, with others her age and older sitting and standing, there is learning, energised dialogue of different perspectives, laughter and tussling frowns as they shape ideas together. She has her place - in relationship - and doesn’t need to be right to know it. The joy is in the process.
She is one of a cast of characters who continue to be discovered, my younger and older selves, as well as parts who represent abstract oppressive socialised beliefs such as patriarchy, whiteness or deficit. A darker version of the movie ‘Inside Out’ if you will, but it’s not all oppression: the chorus includes a poet, parent, body, ancestors, the land I love, my children and more than human companionship. Crowded and jostling - ooh - yes - abundance - imagine the conversations!
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Walt Whitman from ‘Song of Myself, 51.’
As I get acquainted with this rich co-motion of kinfolk, I resist organising them into coherence to be overruled by a sovereign authority, rather choosing to accept that they all have something to offer, all deserve love and understanding. My coach self has begun to scratch her head a little, looking askance at the training that reaches for clarity, more certainty of who we are, the kind of leaders we are, to put a stake in the ground of an ‘authentic self’ to cling to. Fewer people arrive wanting to be jolted off their perch, to get lost, be-wild-ered, surrendered to the flow of life, inevitable motion, to feel the ground quaking and cracking until they fall through.
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment
Rumi
In her book ‘Hospicing Modernity’ Olivia Machado de Oliveira unpicks the ‘non-generative manifestation of the modern desire for a unified, coherent and self-transparent self.’
She continues:
‘Within modernity, maturity is associated with the rule of mind and reason over emotions and the body. This mature self should be unified in a coherent personality (i.e.: under control) that sees both the world and itself objectively. This investment in coherence severely limits our capacity to face and address plurality, uncertainty, ambiguity and unknowability - both within ourselves and in the world at large.’
To deepen this sensing of a richer tone of maturity, she introduces ‘the bus methodology.’ There is a driver and multiple passengers who might be representations of ourselves at different times of our lives: frightened child, rebellious teen, older self, significant others, voices of shaping systems (you are too quiet, too much, not enough, too slow, too direct), rivers, mountains, mycelium - and more - once you begin, (this will never end) it becomes cacophonous and chaotic.
Love is the radical incompleteness of everything
Bayo Akamofale
Throughout the book, which is replete with provocations to look in the mirror at our role in preserving the harms of modernity, she asks, ‘check your bus.’ For example, in exploring my relationship with whiteness and the superiority/perfection/separation it seeks in service of sustaining modernity, it’s more generative for me to have a conversation with acharacter on my bus, than to react from a threatened physiological impulse that manifests resistance, fragility or guilt over accountability.
By the way, if the bus image doesn’t work for you, make something else up and have a play:
‘An orchestra, a theatre, a village, a campfire, an ant farm, squirrels on a spaceship, hamsters in a fairground. The image itself is just a prop for analysis.’
It appeals to me that rather than becoming more certain of who we are, we become more aware of these voices and our bewilderment. Can we become ever more curious about who is driving, conducting, manipulating the machinery - and what might we do about that in order to be in right relationship with the world around us? It’s a deliberate practice for moving with tumultuous times of complex dis-integration.
As always, I return to poetry to find a voice that meets and stretches emergent thinking, it’s a form at ease with the thusness of pluriversality, speaking across time and identity, not in the name of knowing, but in expanding and being with greater truth.
It’s a voice of curious admonition, holding up a mirror to the man who does not know all parts of himself, has resisted the transforming crucible of conversation with the ones who feel beauty, trauma, humility, loss, accountability to earth. He is ‘uncooked.’
By 13th century Iranian poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi in a stunning translation by Haleh Liza Gafori:
Man, man, man,
what kind of lightning are you, setting farms on fire?
What kind of cloud are you, raining down stones?
What kind of hunter?
Caught in your own trap—
a thief stealing from your own house.
You’re sixty years old, you’re seventy years old,
and you’re still uncooked?
Still won’t let Love’s flames near,
won’t let them burn you up?
Enthralled by stuff and status,
the crown, the turban, the king’s beard—
thorns pricking your hands,
but where is your flower?
Gazing in the mirror,
you tilt your hat like a crescent moon—
but where is your light?
Check your bus, your orchestra or playground. Who is responding? What are they feeling? What do they want to share in response to speakers questions?
Thank you Naomi. There is so much to ponder here. I’m curious about our ‘cathedral of selves.’ It grants permission to let all the voices in. A cacophony of voices and selves, all invited to sing.