Speaking Is Sometimes Good

At the core of this contemplative wrestle is a commitment to contexts where voice goes un-tyrannized and silence stays its course.

Speaking is sometimes good. On a page, even scrabbling the words ‘I am struggling’ can be key to expression’s momentum. Writer’s block as lack of authenticity, as in authorship: I am not speaking with my voice.

But sometimes speaking is not so good. Listening, yes. Important. But why speak at all, and to whom am I speaking? Important questions.

What if one speaks to a channel wherein one’s voice cannot be heard? And what if the sound is heard but the message not well heard? Does the medium enable the message? Can soul’s signal find right touch?

The digital is riven with traps that projected voice triggers. Time and time again. This is when the medium becomes the message. Responsiveness squeezed to scripts of reaction. Egos severed from wholes. A truly traumatic landscape.

And in this critical time, when there is so much to share and few places welcoming and wise enough to hear, why even try?

Well, because we are still involved. And no matter how the medium mangles, we must yet bear the burden of response.

So what to make of vaccines, segregation, and the threat of tyranny shrouded in a complex fog of all too human psychology, the madness of crowds, and information warfare? Where politics careens to and fro with a myopic blindness, sprinting to keep the illusion of ground beneath steady in frame. Better not look down or turn around now. Even worse to look up at the employer, the bureaucracy, the authority. Much better to continue playing the simulation so that pretense turns momentum into purpose.

Except of course it isn’t.

But what can we do? Well. Who is we and what do we value? And if we can breathe that in and out, how can we participate as modulators of momentum without snapping the tiller and catching ourselves deeper yet into currents of culture war, made even more treacherous now by the fuel of our reactivity?

But again. Who is we?

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Who am I?

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Tim, 30, 6 ft 3, likes walks on the beach. Unvaccina...

Better not avoid it further.

I am someone who cares. And I am someone who seeks to care in an effective way. This has led me to contend with what matters, or more truthfully, has led me to contend with the process of discerning what matters, given an always already motivated disposition of care.

This is the project of philosophy, more or less. Or at least as understood via the Delphic maxim ‘know thyself’.

And if we are involved then involved we are, in creation. The project of philosophy fundamentally creative, for there is no perfect and complete.

So I am not some vessel that can be known by the quantity of its carry. I am witness to relationships, rotationally on stage and sometimes in the green room or God knows where. I am silence and noise in a dance of signal, moved by rhythms rooted in the real, pulsating through deep history, nourishing and destroying.

I am wave of historic impact, bound one day to break on a sand bank as land draws near and my ride is over. There are many more of me.

I am also someone who doubts. And because I am someone who doubts I want to know how to know.

And so it seems to follow that I am someone who wants to know how I know I am someone who cares.

But it’s not a matter of wanting. It’s just a matter of being.

So now I can apply myself, rejuvenated.

And I consider how to care more effectively. And I remember that an etymological root of care meant ‘to grieve’. And I remember next that etymologies of ‘grieve’ translate to ‘burden’, ‘grave’, ‘heavy.’

Then along this road of words and their roots, we come to the bearing of weight, the bearing of children—a journey at least of care and grief.

A difficult pleasure.

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To care more effectively means to give and to hold what one can and no more, for its time, and to release. Just like the breath. But the breath is circulatory, at least until we die. So it’s not about releasing never to care again. It’s more about passing it on once our watch is done.

The ills of the world may in fact be ours to bear, for a time. But not all the time.

As many of the wise say, it’s a lot about being response able. To enable the trance ending of the ballistic reactivity by being present to the clearing. To meet the call with response, and so to dance and not just go lock step, old script.

Perhaps you’ll come upon a step or two, and others will join in. Time to be careful then, for mimicry is but one part of the process, and it consists in trance.

And here again I wrestle with words — how easy they are replicated, how easily they catch, and how easily they disguise (whether the costume is worn knowingly or not.)

The mode of message as medium of ‘truth’ is often donned by the rigorous coordination of throttled context, moulded to self-serving purpose.

Libellous logos of the highest order, buried in consequence second and third. Effect unknown!

And inscribed so famously —

In the beginning was the Word, 

And it begat many fuckloads more.

Now there’s another six.

Four.

One.

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But speaking is sometimes good.

Vital as the soil and the wind that blows the seed.
Vital as the rain and its many cyclic forms.
Vital as the fire that burns the forest down.
Vital as the mother grieving for her loss.

Vital as the new growth and the love for children young.
Vital as the broken moment when the world says no.
Vital as the dreaming day which hopes to reconnection.
Vital as the dying breath where no more words may go.

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Words to my Master,
Father Time.

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At the core of this contemplative wrestle is a commitment to contexts where courage, care, humility and forgiveness meet with intelligence and integrity, with depth and also levity. Where voice goes un-tyrannized. Where silence stays its course.

Where meaning is sought but not captured and bound to yet more coinage of war. Where that ephemeral duration of appreciation for sameness and difference alike finds reflection in the cosmic eye.

May truth yet slip from certainty, and return to the well that nourishes deep places.

Discernment on the Way,