“O! there are spirits of the air
And genii of the evening breeze,
And gentle ghosts, with eyes as fair
As star-beams among twilight trees:—
Such lovely ministers to meet
Oft hast thou turned from men thy lonely feet.
With mountain winds, and babbling springs,
And moonlight seas, that are the voice
Of these inexplicable things
Thou didst hold commune, and rejoice
When they did answer thee…”
200 years ago yesterday Percy Bysshe Shelley, English Romantic poet, died by drowning at the age of 29… i wanted to acknowledge this lovely imaginal cell and another, the former prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe and in this wild and precious moment of eternity, on this day of living in the imaginal realm, in the last weeks of living in the inquiry of truth and over the last few moons of living in uncertainty, not knowing, open, curious, in wonder, it feels so resonant to salute the imaginal cells with the wherewithal to dream into being an even more beautiful world…
“Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later.”
~ Richard Diebenkorn ~
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“One doesn’t arrive… by necessarily knowing where one is going… In every work of art something appears that does not previously exist, and so, by default, you work from what you know to what you don’t know.”
~Ann Hamilton~
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such an extraordinary moment we are in with our whole island home on pregnant pause,in the liminal space of a mutation cycle, a transformative collective initiation calling us into true reality where everything is uncertain and unknown, so i offer a posting so in sync with where we are now: some of the great Polish poet’s, Wislawa Szymborska, acceptance speech when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996…
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“the poetics of not knowing
Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners — and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.”
…I value that little phrase “I don’t know” so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself “I don’t know,” the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself “I don’t know”, she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying “I don’t know,” and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize…”
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yes, may we earthlings consciously choose to follow the sacred calling of this moment to enter the inner wilder-ness of transformative imagination, of not knowing, of wondering for it is the surrender to not knowing that seeds our co-creation of a sustainable universe where all relatives flourish… strength and courage, beloveds!