It’s approaching that time of year when we let the fire burning in our outdoor wood furnace go out. The ground has thawed and new plants are emerging each day around the property. The temperatures at night are hovering around freezing.
The furnace fire began burning in October. Every morning and every evening since it was lit, it has been necessary to go out and add a few logs (more than a few on the coldest nights) to keep heat supplied to our home and studio. Truth is, I’ll miss the routine when the embers die out.
One of our goals living in this tiny corner of the world we call home is to develop space for the sacred within the domestic. Tending the fire is one of the rituals that aids this.
One of the questions that emerges for me: how else have automated systems removed perhaps unnoticed value from the homestead?
This morning needs to be noted in the life and development of our almost eleven month old daughter. She has crossed a major threshold in the ritual life of our family. For the first time, when the stack of blueberry pancakes was delivered to the table, she partook.
Her embrace of the treat has the rest of us realizing we will need to start making double batches, but the smiles around the table as our newest member not only joined in, but shouted her pleasure, makes the extra effort of the double batch well worth it.
So here’s to Bridghid, who’s life will forever be changed now that she has experienced this sublime form of sustenance.
[third in a series built off post requests from Twitter, @cllecr offered this possibility here, and here.]
“Not far from the Muses’ Hall is an old altar, which also, according to report, was dedicated by Ardalus. Upon it they sacrifice to the Muses and to Sleep, saying that Sleep is the god that is dearest to the Muses.” ~ Pausanias, Description of Greece, II, xxxi, 3.
By way of exploring the proposition that procrastination and incubation are two sides of the same coin, it might serve all of us to get a handle on just what incubation is. Psychological incubation takes place “behind the scenes” when we are faced with a difficult problem. It is the subconscious process whereby the elements of a difficult problem seemingly rearrange themselves so that when reengaging the same problem at a later time, the answer comes “out of the blue.” Ritual incubation was practiced in ancient Greece when a supplicant would go to a sacred place and sleep with the intent of receiving a divinely inspired message or a cure.
Considering these definitions of incubation, perhaps procrastination is not the opposite side of the same coin. Here’s why. The experience of putting off is quite different from the experience of letting go.
With procrastination, the ego devises distractions that allow for further avoidance of the problem. The ego remains in control of it’s inability to find a solution, thereby hampering if not completely shutting out the ability of the subconscious process to propose a solution.
Incubation on the other hand resorts to a power beyond the ego’s ability at the given moment to find a solution. It occurs when the person has reached the end of their capability to solve the given problem. Having expended themselves completely, they are now able to turn to the help from beyond their control.
As an interesting jumping off point, I’ll add this observation of William James from the conclusion of his Varieties of Religious Experience:
“Meanwhile the practical needs and experiences of religion seem to me sufficiently met by the belief that beyond each man and in a fashion continuous with him there exists a larger power which is friendly to him and his ideals. All that the facts require is that the power should be both other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do, if only it be large enough to trust for the next step.”
(Image via Wikipedia)
AziMuth
The most valuable unpublished work I’ve ever come across was a short essay by the poet Charles Olson titled “Notes on Reading Frobenius.” I was honored to receive permission to publish it about eight years ago in a small literary zine I had created, also titled AziMuth. It was an honor because the accomplishment of the publication relied on the insights within the essay. The whole premise using the analogy of an African hunting ritual: “To put one in shape for action.”
One draws a ‘picture’ on a bare spot on the ground, 4 palms size. Just as the sun rises you fire an arrow into the picture. After you have then duplicated the success in the hunt you come back and put hairs of the animal [you took away some grass or tuft to make the spot bare] and some of its blood onto the drawing. Having done this as carefully as you did the preparation you then rub it all away. And then you are free to go eat the animal or anything else, to go about your business until another time when you may, and there isn’t any question that you will, have to do like again in order to do anything as meaningful at all.
There is one catch that Olson makes clear: the importance of not explaining what you are doing. He continues,
“There isn’t but this one way, and with each of its exact steps included [and taken, including not mentioning that that is what you are doing. That is you can say anything which is itself part of doing whatever is sought to be done, but above all & never dare you let that become a knowledge other than its own written evidence, itself as an ability. Or you loose then…”
The danger of talking ‘about’ for any ‘action’: it is how energy gets diverted, siphoned away, depleted. To talk about is to talk around; action, the firing of energy, the release of self into the intended image. Much of the ritual in our lives is directed toward collective spiritual ends, far removed from individual action. Does this serve us?
(image cc via Wikipedia)
Brilliance...
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