There is a way of knowing in ritual that you cannot get through other means… If this thesis is right or even plausible and your life is empty of ritual, that means there are ways of knowing yourself and the world that you are cut off from now—
John Vervaeke
In Part 1 of The Rituals of the Spirit, I consider spirituality, i.e. the rituals of the spirit, from an energetic perspective. I lay claim that “everything is energy” and our awareness of the energetic charge behind everything we encounter may help us become more aware of some of the ways that we do not use our energy optimally. We, unwittingly, give away a considerable amount of our energy, and it is through rituals of the spirit, where we may begin to regain our energetic power, and use it with intention in the pursuit of our goals.
In Part 2, we take an entirely different route, through dark forests, valleys and caves. Spirituality is a matter of life or death, both literally and figuratively. When we do not have a spiritual practice, then we die. We wither away like dried-up leaves or become dispersed like a handful of sand in the wind. We become disorientated and lose our way, not being able to break the surface of the deep sea, called Life, that we’ve been unceremoniously thrust into.
Christian evangelist Leonard Hill said that Jesus Christ did not come into the world to make bad people good, He came to make dead men live. This is what spirituality is about, the practice of choosing life, day in and day out. It is not about ‘being right,’ it is about cultivating wisdom so that the decisions we make about ourselves and others help us to move away from self-destruction and self-deception. The word ‘spirituality’ is derived from the Latin word ‘spiritus’ which means ‘breath’. In this essay, I explore the many different places that this breath can show up in our lives and how it can be life-giving if we can just… well, breathe.
On Respiration
Then “Moses says to God, ‘What is your name?’ And God responds, ‘Moses, you tell them the LORD sent you.’ Now this name, LORD, if you’re reading it in an English translation of the Bible, the name is spelled capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D. The name appears in the Bible over 6,000 times. But it wasn’t originally written in the English language, it was written in the Hebrew language. And in Hebrew the name is essentially four letters. We would say Y, H, V, H [the tetragrammaton]. But in Hebrew, the letters are pronounced: ‘Yod, Heh, Vav, Heh.’ Some pronounce the name ‘Yahweh’ or ‘Yahveh,’ although in many traditions the name isn’t even pronounced, because it’s considered so sacred, so mysterious, so holy. In fact, the ancient rabbis believed that these letters actually functioned kind of as vowels in the Hebrew language. They believed that they were kind of breathing sounds and that ultimately the name is simply unpronounceable because the letters together are essentially the sound of breathing. Yod, Heh, Vav, Heh. Is the name of God the sound of breathing?” In the Bible, the word for ‘breath’ is the same word as the word for ‘spirit.’ In the Hebrew language it’s the word ‘ruah,’ in the Greek language, it’s the word ‘pneuma.’ One Scripture says that when God takes away the ‘ruah,’ the breath of all living creatures, then they die and return to dust. But when God sends the ‘ruah,’ the Spirit, they are created. Breath, Spirit, same word. When you let God in, when you breathe, what happens is you become aware of all the things you need to leave behind, everything you need to let go of.” If you were to be totally honest about what’s going on inside of you, is there anything you need right now to breathe out?”
I watched Rob Bell’s Breathe video in my early varsity days, when Michael Jackson was still alive, which is surprising that during a recent conversation with a friend, I was able to recall the sensory experiences of the video in alarming detail. I could see his face, with the black eyeglasses and remember that he was on the subway. It has really remained with me all of these years.
***
On a balmy Floridian day in 1968, a famous bottlenose dolphin that had brought joy to many children, swam up to where her trainer was sitting with his legs wading in the water. She put her head in his arms, stopped breathing and subsequently died. Kathy was the dolphin that had played the much-adored Flipper on TV. Once the show was over however, Kathy was kept in captivity where a tiny tank became her new home. Ric O’ Barry, in interviews, describes how he could see that she was in anguish and describes her death as a suicide. Turns out that cetaceans take conscious breaths, unlike human beings who breathe unconsciously. It is this unconscious nature of human breathing that makes it easy to take it for granted, just like the young fish in David Foster Wallace’s speech, who are completely unaware of the water that they are swimming in. We forget that breathing is the essence and that the human body cannot perform any acts without this constant supply of breath or air that we are ‘swimming’ in. People like Wim Hof, James Nestor, Travis Elliot or Sam Harris have done an excellent job in returning us to breath. Breath is essentially the very beginning, the middle, and the very end of our existence. It is all encompassing, and it is the entire story. And yet, years can go by without sparing a thought to it. WILD!
To take us a step further, it is not just that breath gives life but it attunes, enhances, brings out the very best out of our lives and ourselves. It is not this one-dimensional or passive entity, it itself lives and injects vitality into every part of us. In the Bible, the Holy Spirit comforts, empowers, enriches, edifies, guides, heals, clarifies, strengthens, perfects, protects, provides, produces fruit, enlightens, ennobles and transforms. There is more to what it does than this but I think I have ‘three dimensionalized’ it, brought it to life in a way. The spirit does not just give us life, it enlivens us in every sense of the word. When we do not open our lungs (souls) to its capacity, then there are limits to the power we can tap into. When we are living shallowly (shallow-breathing), we cannot change the temperature of a room like Wim Hof can, or dive to death-defying depths of the ocean like free-divers can. We cannot access the calm of the eye of the storm, run an ultramarathon, take in that large breath of courage to ask the girl we like out on a date or ask our boss for a raise. Without intentionality behind our ways of breathing, invoking God with every exhale and inhale, how can we even ascend enough to kiss His face? Or as Lupe Fiasco puts it, summon the forest and talk to the trees? Deep calls unto deep, and without this intentionality, we may never hear this call. “When you are no longer able to say the name of God… you die” (Rob Bell).
Breathing is a two part process, you take in what your body needs and then expel what you don’t need. Most of us are of the opinion that the most important part of breathing is the inhale but there is a general consensus among scientists that we breathe because of a carbon dioxide build-up. If we take this a step further, then we can interpret this as a metaphorical need to breathe out the bad stuff so that we can let the good stuff in. “God is always trying to give good things to us,” wrote St. Augustine, “but our hands are too full to receive them.” Before we can get the new, the old has to go. Before we can thrive, we have to do away with all the beliefs, perspectives, methods that no longer serve us, as they say. In order to be born again, parts of ourselves need to die. More often than not, we are held back by things that we need to let go of, rather than things we need to grab onto. There is a saying that what got us to this point, won’t be sufficient to take us to the next place, in every and any part of our lives.
Professor of Kinesiology, Andy Galpin, explains the ability to stay in shape in a similar way. We burn fat through respiration. He explained that everything that we eat, that is used as fuel or stored within our cells as fat is made of carbon. The name of the macronutrient carbohydrate gives this away. Therefore the carbon in the carbon dioxide that we breathe out comes from the food that we eat. The more carbon we expel through cardiovascular exercise then the more fat we burn. Even weight loss is the process of releasing carbon that no longer serves us.
There are many things that we carry with us, from childhood trauma to relationship drama, that can really slow us down. Our shoulders are overladen with crosses we have no business carrying. Others of us, knowing that becoming unburdened may lighten us, refuse to shrug the world off of our shoulders, because we know that there will no longer be any circumstances behind which we can possibly hide. Our pasts have become a convenient alibi, letting us off the hook so that we truly do not have to engage with life. We close ourselves to any aspirations and any potential failures that may come along for that particular ride. We play it safe and live small dormant lives.
There is a tree called the Ziziphus mucronata that McCallum draws attention to in Ecological Intelligence which is quite remarkable. This tree appears in every culture in South Africa and each culture has a different name for it, which I find rather interesting because all the different names for it converge in a beautiful way. Before I go into the different meanings, it is worthwhile to first describe the physical appearance of the tree because a lot of meaning has been derived from it as well. “The thorns of the tree Ziziphus mucronata are spaced along the length of every branch in pairs,” writes McCallum. “One of the pair points robustly outward and forward while the other curves back and inward in the opposite direction.” In the meta-scheme of things, the tree is called the tree of life which is salient for so many reasons.
In an artitle titled Umphafa: What is in a name?, the Umphafa Nature Reserve writes:
The leaves and fruit of this tree are sought after by many birds and animals. Giraffes are especially fond of the leaves and even dead leaves that have fallen to the ground will often be eaten by animals such as impala, so little is wasted. A tasty spinach can be made from boiling the leaves and honey can be found in the flowers. During the Boer war the seeds of the fruit were ground to make a coffee substitue and you can even make beer from the fruit if fermented properly. Medicinally, an extract from the roots can be used as a painkiller on external complaints such as boils, sores, glandular, and chest swellings. With all these different uses it is an important tree to have in abundance on the reserve... In some regions of South Africa, it is believed that the tree is immune to lightning therefore it will be chosen as a tree to shelter under if caught in a storm. It is also believed that if it is felled in the summer months then great droughts will follow. Some tribes will use the tree to make kraals or hedges in which they will keep their livestock to protect them from lions and other predators.
The tree is used to lead spirits of those who have died from the place of death, home. In isiXhosa, the tree is referred to as Umlahlankosi, under which a chief is buried. There is something here that connects the tree with the wisdom as chiefs are seens as intermediaries between people and the highest authorities. One of my favorite rappers, Zakwe, in his song with Duncan AMA Level, drops a few bars on this legendary tree. They don't call him the Shaka Zulu of Rap for nothing, this guy has his finger on the pulse on all things significant.
I am a super nerd when it comes to symbolism so allow me a little indulgence here. In the garden of Eden, when God cursed the land, he introduced the thorn bush into the ‘ecosystem’. When God appeared to Moses through the burning bush, it was a thorn tree. The crown that is placed on Jesus’ head in the passion is made of thorns therefore, in his crucifixion he vindicates the thorn tree. The apostle Paul in the new testament refers to a “thorn in his flesh” which most scholars believe to be epilepsy. There is some aspect of reality that is disclosed through the symbolism of thorns and it does not surprise me that this very tree of life should be made of thorns. The tree highlights the dualistic or paradoxical nature of life. It is a life-giving tree which also presents hardship and suffering. It has a thorn pointing forwards to the future and another one pointing backwards towards the past; reflection and aspiration. Rootedness and ascendance, soul and spirit. The Afrikaans people of South Africa refer to this tree as the “wag ‘n bietjie (wait just one moment)” tree which is a stark reminder that reflection plays a critical part in the process of moving forward. It is only once we have truly reflected, then can we begin to truly move forward. Without reflection, then how can we know for sure that we are indeed moving forward as opposed to spinning in circles of pathology? In my home language, seTswana, the Ziziphus mucronata is known as the mokgalo which translates to ‘space’ or ‘gap’, the in-between of respiration, the space between the exhalation and the inhalation, a primordial pause, a “wag-ing” as it were. Across the different cultures, the name of the tree points to respiration and aspiration. It provides a throughline through our past and our future, a lifeline that connects us so that we are not archipelagos of patterns of behavior adrift at sea, but anchored and grounded in a reality that moves us forward in meaningful ways. The tree points us to spirit but also to soul.
McCallum, in brilliant fashion, shares the story of how ‘soul’ became subsumed under ‘spirit’ when they are two different things. Most of us are unable to differentiate between spirit and soul and we treat them interchangeably. McCallum writes how when Jesus was born, the god Pan was declared dead. Pan was representative of Pagan beliefs or perhaps of polytheism and Jesus Christ’s birth silenced all the other gods. When Pan died, so did soul for that matter. Soul, which symbolizes depth, rootedness, warmth, creativity and femininity were incorporated into a masculine spirit. Our feet were levitated off the ground by spirit and lost our moorings with the earth. Our minds and hearts could only occupy themselves with the heavenly and we alienated ourselves from the nature from which we came. It has been said that man cannot live on bread alone, but let us not forget that among the many things that man lives on, bread is indeed still one of them. And so, in the year 869, when the Nicene Creed, of which I am familiar having been raised Anglican, was finalized in Constantinople. Psychologist James Hillman describes how the Nicene Creed was the cement poured over the casket in which soul was buried. “Our notion of a tripartite cosmos of spirit, soul and body, devolved into a dualism of spirit (or mind) and body (or matter). What the Constantinople Council did to soul, rejecting this image, only culminated a long process beginning with Paul, the Saint, of substituting and disguising, and, forever after, confusing soul with spirit.” When I was working through The Psychology of Money course, one of the activities had to do with identifying my own values by noticing what I value in other individuals. I wrote, in my journal, that I deeply admired the writer Teju Cole for his rootedness. That coupled with my sheer fascination with trees may just be the string that tugs at the heart of the kite that is myself, keeping me from spiralling into my existential condition and keeping me from completely disappearing into the skies on intellectual alienation. “A miracle was the tree, something in front of which humans should kneel, humbly, in the silent amazement which, in reality, is sister to worship,” C Louis Leipoldt.
It is worth noting, Zakwe’s second album is titled Impande (the root), his third album titled Cebisa (the one who shares wisdom), and the first single from his forthcoming album is titled Isihlalo Sobukhosi (the throne) all highlight so many dimensions of the ziziphus. There is both an Aristotelian vertical ascent of aspiration and actualization coupled with the reflectiveness and rootedness of soul.
Spirit and soul are not the same. Like the rows of thorns on the ziziphus, they anticipate each other. They are complementary opposites. Spirit is cool, pointed, and soaring. It gives us wings. Soul is Earthbound and warm. It gives us roots. It loves the Earth and everything that comes out of it. Soul knows about the shadow. And as any-one involved in healing will tell you, the wounds of the spirit are most often healed by soul (McCallum).
Aspirations
My blog is titled “The Becoming of Lebogang Moeketsi” because it is a loose chronicle of my becoming. Like the ship of Theseus, I am always being changed, and yet remaining Lebogang Moeketsi throughout these changes. My values have changed over the years and will continue to do so particularly because I am continually engaging in aspirational projects; projects of self-transcendence. My becoming, however, is not something that has an end point, I ‘become’ in perpetuity. The end point does not even matter to me, I let infinity take care of itself; my main concern is living in such a way that with every passing year, I seek out transformative experiences which help me see myself, others and God a little bit more clearly. D.H Lawrence put it so well when he wrote:
That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest that strange gods come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will always try to recognize and to honor the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed.
Author of Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming, Agnes Callard, describes aspiration as the rational process by which we work to care about (or love, or value, or desire…) something new. Projects of aspiration require a degree of resistance, letting go of old values and aiming for new ones is difficult. Old values are readily at hand, while new ones are yonder, there, by the horizon. Hard work is an aspirational necessity, it cannot be circumvented in any way. No one else can take on aspirational projects for you either. It is your work if it is to transform you in any way.
Last year, a “Dr Matthew Lani” trended in South Africa after he was exposed for impersonating a doctor, going as far as selling medication and offering medical advice on social media platforms. While becoming a doctor may have been an aspiration of Lani’s, he did not do the necessary work required for him to realize that aspiration. Perhaps he wanted the money, and prestige afforded to those who wear white robes with stethoscopes hanging around their necks, but becoming a “doctor” for Lani was more about living up to the values he already had, as opposed to attaining new values. He had always valued money and prestige over everything else which is why impersonating a doctor seemed a viable way for him to connect himself with that money and prestige. Doctors who swear by the hippocratic oath actually care about helping people, and clearly Lani did not care about the people he gave medical advice and sold medication to, because if he had cared about them, that line of action would be completely unthinkable. He is actually willing to put their lives in danger for the bells and whistles associated with the medical profession. That is not an aspiration, as there is no self-transcendence here. In fact, quite the contrary was achieved through the whole debacle, he debased himself. Let’s remember the words of Jim Rohn here, when he said that what’s important is not getting the million, it is what it makes of you to achieve the million. Most lottery winners are back where they started a year after winning the lottery, because winning the lottery was not a transformative experience. Without, there was huge change, within, not so much. Old values remain readily at hand.
When we are willing to “lie, cheat and steal” our way to [fill in the blank], then we are just ambitious, but we are not aspirants. We are no different from Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, Frank and Claire Underwood… cautionary tales, every single one of them. “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?”
Callard also writes, “we all drift and change in response to our environment, cultural pressures, etc. Sometimes, we change without even noticing it. The aspirant’s movement is not of this kind, since she actively moves herself.” This means, when we use our family names or golf-club networks or game the system to climb certain ladders or gain access to certain privileges, or hold gala’s to donate to charities, we are playing the ambition game. I can respect a hustle as a hustle, but let us not kid ourselves into thinking it is anything deeper, anything substantial, anything transformative irrespective of how many zeroes accompany that hustle. I recently learned that the word ‘vicious’ comes from the word ‘vice,’ I had a duh moment. I’ve come to see that the most vicious of us in this country are those of us who have vested interests and are willing, tooth and nail, to protect those interests. When we are spending most of our waking hours courting vice, when do virtuous projects of aspiration begin? But, I digress.
Callard brings up the conflicted aspirant in her book, which is someone who has aspirations but has a hard time letting go of the old values. They feel the tug within that whispers to them to follow a certain path but they ignore it or dismiss it as being too much hard work. We’ve all experienced it but not all of us follow our Campbellian bliss. Perhaps we are afraid of what others will think of us or afraid of failing and looking stupid or any of the other emotional permutations that we may experience in these types of situations. The problem is this is a recipe for regret, as we will always be plagued by the call. Even though no one else can hear the spirit swirling around within us, we know what we need to do. We cannot escape our aspirations, they torment us like hungry ghosts, flipping over the pictures on the walls of our interiority, begging for us to pay attention to them. “If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you,” writes Joseph Campbell. “And the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.” This is what the aspirational life offers us, the meaning-enriching feeling that even though being an aspirant is difficult, it is precisely what we should be doing with our lives at this particular juncture. It is also good work because it transforms us for the better. Truly transformative experiences are in part transformative because we can never truly comprehend what it is we receive until we actually receive the fruits of the aspirational labor. Our imaginations can only take us so far, it is only until we are fully immersed in our aspirational efforts when bundles of boundless joy reach our shores. “As time goes on, however, the fact (if it is a fact) that we are still at it is usually a sign that we find ourselves progressively more able to see, on our own, the value that we could barely apprehend at first. This is how we work our way into caring about the many things that we, having done that work, care about,” writes Callard.
Inspiration
While in conversation with John Vervaeke, Jordan B. Peterson explains that the word ‘slogan’ is derived from words that essentially mean ‘the battle cry of the dead.’ Sloganeering, itself, is something that is met with contempt because it rings hollow and loud like a tin can. In the prologue of Martin Buber’s I and Thou, Walter Kaufmann writes that some books are stillborn which describes dead books. Living books are books that stand the test of time, they are books which we can continuously return to at different times in our lives and they keep our hearts beating. Nassim Taleb, ever the one to give advice, says that the books that we should be reading are those that are still relevant at least a decade after being published. These are the books that are inspired. Herein lies the fundamental difference between motivation and inspiration. The reason that motivation can not take us far is that the words are dying as they leave the lips of the motivational speaker. “In the beginning was the word, the word was with God and the word was God,” the book of John reads. When the gutenberg press opened the printing flood gates, the Bible became the best selling book of all time. This should come as no surprise since Jesus Christ was no motivational speaker. Jesus Christ ‘achieved’, according to the Hip Hop artist Nipsey Hussle, the highest human act which is to inspire. Jesus Christ came to give life, to inspire with a new breath. This is why the Bible, and other canonical religious texts, for that matter, remain perennial bestsellers. They are living and have the ability to midwife life-altering, life-affirming and long-lasting changes within people. Inspiration works from the inside while motivation tries to work from the outside in. The act of inspiration shakes us up and opens us up for a time where we can decide to take it upon ourselves to decide whether we are going to sow the seed of change within us or not. No one is telling us what decision to take or what to do, but it is ultimately up to us to use that inspiration in a positive way. Motivation is a shift of personal responsibility where we expect other people to rally us up to engage in truly meaningful experiences which undermines the entire enterprise of taking personal responsibility for our lives making it short lived as well.
In the podcast episode titled The Neuroscience of Speech, Language and Music, Andrew Huberman interviews Dr. Erich Jarvis who explains in great detail how human beings sang before they spoke. As an African, this insight was embraced with the familiarity and the openhearted warm welcome of a beloved family member who has been away for a long time but has finally returned home. We are a singing and dancing people. It runs deep within us. I was listening to Zenzile: The Reimagination of Miriam Makeba by Somi and Thandiswa Mazwai’s Tiny Desk Concert performance recently. In Somi’s rendition of Makeba’s Pata Pata, she introduces the song with a 1969 interview of Makeba in Finland. When Makeba is asked if the people of South Africa are happy? She replies that black South Africans are happy because they continue to sing and dance. In 1969, the scourge of racism had a chokehold on the throats of black people in the country. Our spirits, as black people, were not broken because we still had a song in our throats and dance (making music with our bodies) tucked away in our hips. We survived because these primordial responses were far larger than our pain and could therefore assuage them, albeit momentarily, and see us to the next day. Singing and dancing were not just analgesics, they were also expressions of deep joy. If you would spend a little time in South Africa, you will observe that the ones who suffered the most are the most rooted and spirited and have truly mastered the ability to quaff from the deep well of joy that life can offer amidst heart-rending suffering. Ofcourse, as that lyric from The Eagles' Lyin’ Eyes goes, “every form of refuge has its price.” Prince Kaybee’s Fetch Your Life with Msaki on the vocals and Thebe’s Groover’s Prayer, (innocuous at first listen) touch on what happens when our strengths become dependencies but that is an essay for another day. For the most part, song and dance are things that have completed and strengthened the identity of the black people on this continent which is truly as beautiful as we are.
And so in Lahl’Umlenze Thandiswa Mazwai sings, “ndinebhongo; ndiyaziquenya ngawe mzontsundu… thina siphila ngengoma (I am proud of you. I pride myself on you black nation… music is our life.) While books have played an undeniable and indispensable role in my becoming, music has been the grammar of my becoming. It has been the language through which I can make sense of the world around me and the way I form the deepest connections with the people around me. It has always been the way I know I am alive because through it, I have a rich history and a future worth moving towards. As I type this, Boom Shaka’s Lerato is streaming through my headphones. It, therefore, makes ontological sense to me that we were singing before we were speaking, from a phenomenological and existential perspective. In Richard “Humpty” Vission’s Alright, Devon’e sings “All I need is the music…. Everything will be alright.” I concur.
Singing is the living word, much like poetry whose rhythm beats in the heart of men and not in their vocal cords. It is song through which the muezzin calls men to prayer, restless babies are lulled to sleep with “hush little baby,” grief is collectively shared within the community to unladen the hearts of those personally aggrieved with “hamba ntliziyo yam’ (go, heart of mine, go). It was in an effort to resist the overpowering allure of the Siren’s song, where Odysseus tied himself to the mast of his ship and avoided a shipwreck. It is a reason why worship is an integral part of liturgy and also, on the other hand, why in Christian mythology, the devil is considered the angel of music. It is the magic in a movie like Happy Feet and a musical like Chicago. It is the stepping-inspiring gumboot dance of Southern African miners in the face of the harshest working and living conditions. It is the sixth sense of those on the spectrum as it was for Johannes Sebastian Bach. Nietzsche was on to something when he wrote that “we listen to music with our muscles.” Steven Pinker referred to music as “auditory cheesecake,” Steven Jay Gould as an exaptation (instead of an adaptation) and William James as something that made its way into our minds “by the back stairs.” To me, music is more fundamental than that. It is the way that we humans have been able to express ourselves when words prove insufficient. It holds the entire gamut of human emotion, expression and communication, even those not known to us or those beyond our means of articulation. More than anything, music moves us, as Nietzsche reminded us, it is in our tendons, ligaments, bones, and fascia. It is physiological and when a song strikes a chord within us, all of a sudden possibility materializes before our very eyes, and our weary bones are brought to life with a vengeance. Ofcourse, music is not immune to mortality. There is music that is itself dead and which, as a consequence, slowly siphons us of the vitality we need to face life with enthusiasm. This is not the music I am referring to. Living music hearkens and responds to us as we do to it. It is dynamic and relational at the collective level but also at the individual’s quiet, and intimate level.
Poetry offers us the same. When Rainer Maria Rilke encountered the bust of Apollo, it exhorted: “You must change your life” which are words that sit with all of Rilke’s readers. Words that can at times be uncomfortable, but oftentimes encouraging. Years later from the first time I read Rilke, there the words sit in the living room of my interiority gathering warmth, gently and patiently rocking back and forth, waiting for me to enter into dialogue with them. In his article titled Can Rilke Change Your Life? Kamran Javadizadeh expresses a similar effect that Rilke had on him:
I discovered that Rilke's poems were writing back to me. By that I mean not simply that the lines offered wisdom that was keyed to my (all-too-common) predicament, but rather that, as I read, my ordinary, incoherent life seemed artfully arranged there on the page ahead of me, point by suddenly luminous point. The poems were reading my mind and reflecting it back as someone else's poetry. Was I that someone else?
And so is the nature of poetry, which transforms us by questioning us. A questioning that does not paralyze us with insurmountable self- doubt but is revelatory in its way to point us towards our best selves. Great poetry explodes our universes and at the same time, shows us “how enormous [our] whole extent is, reaching all the way to the stars.” I find myself posing the same question that Javadizadeh posed. Am I that someone else? Am I not yet fully myself yet?
For McCallum, poetry is much more than a language, it is an attitude. The word poetry is derived from the word poema which means to create or to make. It is “the voice of those who can speak of anger and beauty in one breath… poetry comes at us from both sides, from the inside and from the out.” He continues:
If you are with me, you will understand that the poetry. I am interested in is not necessarily that of verse and rhyme. I am interested in the lines and images in the bones of the reader, that make children ask for a second reading and that stir the exhausted mindsets of civil servants who can’t wait until they retire. I am interested in the poems that can hold the tension and the wisdom between the words yes and no.
Poet Stephen Watson describes poetry as an act of the inherent human tendency to protest against all that wishes to confine, subjugate or mutilate the human spirit. Poetry is beyond ideology or the sloganeering of that which endeavors to totalize. It holds the infinite in the palm of its hands. E.O. Wilson writes that poetry is a vocation “committed to new ways of seeing things and of saying them.” It does not motivate; it inspires over and over again in new and different ways. It is the river of Heraclitus that knows no end, ever changing, becoming more of a river with each passing moment.
David Ogilvy, Benjamin Disraeli, Michel de Montaigne, George Eliot, Charlie Munger, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Winston Churchill are some of the few names who vow by enthusiasm. They believe that human beings are truly alive when they are at their most enthusiastic. The word enthusiasm is derived from the enthusiasmos which means to be filled with the gods. The most enthusiastic people are the ones who are kissing the face of God. We are at our best when we are most enthusiastic. Those who have experienced flow know this. Flow is the culmination of respiration, aspiration and inspiration and what a breathtaking thing it is to behold. The rituals of the spirit are those that bring us closer to the gods because they bring us closer to what God had in mind when he created us, but they also bring us ever closer to reality, to our limitations. Our spirituality helps us ride the fine balance of life’s paradoxes while consciously maintaining our breath, with our hearts attuned aspirationally to the transcendentals, our bodies in song and dance, accompanied by the willingness to wipe the film off the mirror of our truest selves and get to authentically know them.
