"I still haven't found what I'm looking for," not quite...

I want to feel in touch with, part of, something so vast we might as well call it omnipotent, all powerful. It seems likely to me that all of us need this or something like it, but I don't want this is to read like a sermon or a bossy directive so I will simply write in terms of what I need.

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;”
            (Wordsworth)

I take the poet to be saying that we don’t much feel part of Nature, in the sense that it is ours and we are its.

There are powerful polarising forces in our culture, and I'm not just talking about politics. For example, we tend to feels that someone who is troubled, as Wordsworth was, by the materialistic excesses of our choice-driven culture necessarily wants to turn away from the material world, maybe to live on top of a mountain in China. 

Well that's not me; our technological culture is rich in benefits for nearly all of us - let's take that as read. But I do believe too often we lay waste our powers with endless fussing about insignificant differences between one consumer good or one experience, and another. We haven't got much of a frame against which to set the glittering lure of everything the marketing industry has created to draw us towards products and experiences. 

It’s too easy to think that expressing our individual selves through choice and consumption is all we need to do for a happy life. In any case, as long as 1% of the world’s population owns - what is it Oxfam said? 80%? - of the world’s wealth, and we know that fact, how can pure materialism feel like a satisfying way to live? (We really do need to do something about that 1%, but that’s not my brief here.)

You might justifiably object that there are still very many people in the West who follow a religious teaching, and those teachings are frequently critical of materialism as an end in itself. So there are and so they do. 

Some of those teachings seem to me socially benevolent and supportive of individual calm and well-being. Others, by their self-righteous exclusion of everything they disagree with, are the reverse of calm and benevolent, as far as most of us are concerned. 

And they are occasionally socially toxic and physically dangerous; but let's not get into the wearisome argument between pro and anti-Dawkins - are religious people or atheists more likely to be wicked? Crusaders and jihadists vs Mao and Stalin. Since almost all of us are neither, let’s take something else as read: it’s what individuals do with their beliefs that ultimately matters, much more than the beliefs themselves.

It would be so much simpler to be a devout Christian or a gentle Muslim, but that may not really do for those of us who can't accept the demands of faith in supernatural beings. 

Although I think we do in the west exaggerate the importance of belief over practice, and although I can see the potentially  supportive nature of regular religious observance, this whole area of life is too important to me for any faking or wishful thinking, and that’s what I’d be doing if I started saying a "Hail Mary, Full of Grace." We can't unknow what we think we know - unless it is shaken to bits by something else.

Gradually, bit by bit, that shaking has been an uncomfortable but rewarding part of my living. It is leading me away from either total belief in a major religion, or a purely rationalist, materialist understanding of our world.

One thing remains firm and clear, for me at least: omnipotence cannot be anthropomorphic. God cannot have a human face or any human attributes. So I need to keep looking.

Someone once wrote that people who are happy with a religious faith and regular observance can expect a calmer and happier time of it than those who are working things out for themselves in what is called "A spiritual path.” (Sorry about that clumping great modern cliche!) The path-seekers will have a lonely, restless time of it.

So be it.

oceans part III - distance and negative capability

That High Victorian  poet of doubt and loneliness Matthew Arnold might seem increasingly remote to some modern sensibilities, but he can still chuck out a line to stop you in your tracks. (Arnold's capitals and italics, btw.)

 "YES! in the sea of life enisl’d,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know."


We're back where we live now, a long way from where we've been. 

From this:

to this:

It's good to settle back, readjust the colour palette, season and time of day, re-engage with family and good friends in the UK.

But we are geographically separated from some people we wish we were a lot closer to; there are "echoing straits between us thrown."

The pain of geograhical separation is mediated by electronic non-distance. Thanks to Saint Berners-Lee we can talk and see over vast expanses of space and time. You can't throw your arms round a Skype or FaceTime screen, but they sure help. Passenger aircraft fly at not much below the speed of sound. Those we love are - in theory - only a day away.

 Keats wrote in a letter of the importance of what he called "Negative Capability: that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."


The map on the seat-back set in front of me showed something schematic, unreal:

In this huge aluminium tube, am I really where the little white plane says I am? Are those I want closer to me really so far away? What is geography to the workings of the heart?


I'm finding big paradoxes here. 

There is only one ocean, whether it's brilliant azure or delicate blue-greys. 

Meditation can create a sense of oneness, unity with both the azure and the blue-grey, with them there and us here. 

We can agree with Keats, and say further that living with paradox is an essential part of freedom, of living in the now not in the land of "back then" or "ooo er, whatever next.."

Yet there still lies between us "the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea."

The internet cannot entirely gainsay the Indian Ocean.

floods and our own natures

If I lived in Cockermouth, I'd not want lectures about the follies of building on a flood-plain, which may indeed be folly, but the town wasn't built on such a daft place. It had the misfortune to grow around the confluence of two rivers, and has suffered in recent years from floods caused by what were up to now truly exceptional rainfall levels.

The river, TS Eliot tells us, is a strong brown god; it is a problem to solve for the builders of bridges, or merely a useful way of transporting goods, but "sullen and intractable, untrustworthy," "waiting, watching and waiting." And he also tells us that "his rhythm" is part of our lives, part of us, present "in the nursery bedroom" and other domestic places.

He's reminding us, perhaps, that we are part of the same natural forces and processes that make the rivers flow - and flood in rage sometimes. Bit like Dylan Thomas with his "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, drives my green age."  

This correlation between natural powers and what we are suggests that there are within each of us sullen, intractable, untrustworthy forces - the potential to rage and flood, as well as burst through in green springtime. 

It seems to me that it is when we don't acknowledge, understand and to some degree accept these forces within us, as opposed to ignoring or trying to repress them - or projecting them onto people around us - that is when we rage and flood and generally bust things up. 

Water will find its own level, the lowest channel it can; it works round things when it can.

But when it can't.... 

What the waves at Coogee Beach have to tell me

A dip in the briny is a dip in the briny wherever you are, right?

Not really. I'm no power swimmer, so I don't concentrate on speed or distance, which I suppose might reduce the differences between swimming locations. 

A few strokes, a float, tread water, swim a bit more- so there's time to tune in to the ocean, the sea state, the light, the breeze, the - splash! 

A face full of Indian Ocean, because there is a bit of a swell today, nothing huge or surfer-exciting, just enough to make it particularly enjoyable to float on my back and feel lifted and lowered, with a powerful but irregular rhythm. We saw the oceanic rollers pounding ashore during stormy weather further south, in Eagle Bay. Here there's just a sense of that irresistible power handling me gently. I wouldn't have lasted long in the storm surf, that's for sure. 

The ageing intellect starts up. I"m mostly salt water; life evolved from the sea; the land's edge is the sea"s edge. TS Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" much on my mind recently. There is a strange kind of between-two-worlds belonging that comes from being rocked in the oceanic cradle. 

Always assuming that the classic Australian terror-fish isn't homing in on that tiny cut on my ankle, gaining speed, breaking the surface.....stop it. it's too shallow here, and there's a sort of shark deterrent line of floats I'm swimming inside. You're more likely to be struck by lightning. 

Another splash in the face. I shall give up thinking too much, and just float, rise and fall, dip and sway, give in to the the sensations of the present moment.

..."the unhurried ground swell....the ground swell that is and was from the beginning.."

Or, with apologies to Dylan Thomas, "the force that through the green ocean drives the swell, drives my green age" and very pleasant it is too. For a little while, I belong here, in this moment- rising, falling back, rising...