S.O.S.! Respect for the soul at work

About two and a half weeks ago, my friend, Tony, from the days when we both still lived in Hogsback, called out of the blue.

Out of that day's unclouded sky, Tony brought renewed focus into my mind's unexpecting eye.

He asked me to clarify Table Love. He said he is busy writing about Table Love, because he feels it's important for people, for the world.

In that moment, he did something important for me: he took me back to a ritual, which my late husband, the poet Norman Morrissey, and I began for the first time on the 3rd of July 2010. It was really simple. We sat down together at his big oak table and absorbed ourselves into a companionable solitariness. Each listened to what came to him or her out of the silence. When something arrived that was more or less pleasing, true, satisfying, playful or significant, we wrote it down. In silence.

Whoever finished first, waited quietly, for as long as it took the other to complete 'their thing' - thought-string, piece, or poem. When both pens had been re-capped, we read our 'things' out to one another. Invariably we hummed and gave our sense, our understanding of what the other had done. Sometimes we commented, made suggestions, and sometimes we praised one another's creations. So there was a natural flow from companionable, silent solitude to sharing, responding and communicating.

There is nothing quite like sharing an absorbed, creative silence with another or, indeed, with others.

It occurred to me, after talking to my friend, that the Hiku Hikes are really extensions of Table Love, with the added benefit of being outdoors and susceptible to all the fresh air and stimuli offered there. In the Hiku Hikes, too, we move from silence to sharing, to further silent work, to further subsequent sharing. It's dynamic, peaceful and stimulating, nourishing both individual and communal needs.

The single most crucial aspect of both Table Love and the Hiku Hikes, I would say, is respect for the space of another human soul at work. The soul works in the dimension of what is sometimes known as 'the dreamwork', that is to say, in a dimension that is temporarily independent of pressing or immediate worries and concerns, a dimension whose concern is a lucid state of consciousness, whereby time and space are inhabited simultaneously without undue friction, and without the body necessarily being in action.

When you are truly engaged on a creative level, you cannot think yourself into another space, nor another time, than the one you are inhabiting at that moment. In other words, a kind of unification takes place between body, mind, heart and spirit. I venture that it is that unification, or unity, which we call soul. It is frequently felt as deep concentration - the choice of the word 'concentration' for this state of being-doing is not accidental. All parts of us are brought to a common centre or fulcrum. 

When a person has had no opportunity for and no experience of this, they cannot understand this process. A person who keeps their dreams away from the everyday, indeed, away from themselves, who is unaware of the needs of their soul, will automatically suffer impatience, there is a restlessness that prevents them from giving themselves or the other person silence and proper solitude. With this inbuilt lack of generosity and lack of respect for Time and Space, our industrialised, digitalised modern culture has been, to quite a large extent, dangerous to the dreamwork, if not lethal to the soul.

The peculiar need to throw stones into the still ponderings of others is motivated by mischievous jealousy and greed, not for anything material, but for the substance of their souls. It connects to a need to own the other person's time and space and to command it. It consumes what the other has, because oneself does not have it. Many people are anxious to prevent others from having what they themselves do not have. And many more compulsively inflict injury on others to avenge injuries they themselves have borne and have not tended to, let alone healed.

Human beings everywhere are doing what we can to remedy the situation in numerous ways, we are, many of us, occupied with the vital question of how to save our souls. The open secret, of course, is that it is for each of us to save our own, hence the emergence of healing modalities, such as soul retrieval, somatic trauma release, mindfulness workshops; bringing in fresh concepts and vocabulary to assist understanding, such as 'enneagram' and 'ecopsychology'; along with truly mindboggling advances globally in overall emotional and psychological literacy for everyman and -woman, for everygirl and -boy.

To paraphrase Pearl S. Buck, where the human soul used to be the most underdeveloped terrain on earth, it has become a hotspot of attention for the very good reason that reason alone has proved to be not enough!

It is a question of protecting the creative self, of preserving the creative flame, for it alone is the carrier of human souls forward. That, and the freedom of laughter, playfulness. Such insight comes not in garrulous, excited, or fretful company, but murmurs in the unruffled privacy of ponderings.

by Silke Heiss, published in Greater Matter

by Silke Heiss, published in Greater Matter.
The playful layout is thanks to Flow Wellington of Poetree Publications. 

Prior to milk and bread

Mariss Stevens' Containment series caught my eye on Instagram. The series is a set of quilted images created over the past weeks. Her latest blogpost, On Containment (22nd May 2020), describes the process from conception to finish, including a definition of 'containment' as holding (holding back) and 'restraint'.

"The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self", the poet Ilya Kaminsky recently (14th May 2020) quoted Stravinsky speaking about musical composition, on Twitter - "And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision."

In Mariss' series, vases contain and constrain flowers, which are pulled into captivity by the mouths of vessels, thence to fountain out their blossoms the more -

Containment #3

Containment #7

 Tree trunks operate similarly.

Containment #1

The constraints of format and resources, in this series, expands in the fifth work - not only to flip the orientation of of the work from portrait to landscape, but also beyond inward - house and garden - motifs, to reach quite literally for the moon.

Containment #5

Mariss judges the connection between it and the theme to be "nebulous", but I question that judgment. The series consists of eight works - the number which, flipped sideways, represents infinity in mathematics; and the one that in the arcane realm symbolises balance between heaven and earth. Five is understood to bring chaos and conflict, but also transformation and change.

Mariss' moon in this series is pregnant with the potency of the time-piece, which that heavenly body is, in relation to the earth: determining our calendar, the tides and feminine cycles. The exquisite fabricated image, contained upon the background in its frame and constrained by its position in the series overall, reflects an undertow of truth, which penetrates the boundaries of the lockdown in utter peace.

'Time as a task' during quarantine has recently been found by Parul Seghal - in an essay entitled In Search of Time Lost and Newly Found (19th May 2020) - to be a slippery and bewildering challenge; but these little textile works demonstrate the power of working with time, working within its natural limits. The crafter-artist flowers again and again inside her hours and her works are pollen grains, or little moons, from the hands of her soul.

All our days are numbered, that is to say: limited, but each day contains its own potential. I pondered the practicalities of this mystery in a pollen grain of my own, a blogpost from about a year ago, entitled Time as an organic fact (14th May, 2019).

Time can be felt as "a natural sequence of moments blossoming their opportunities", I wrote, and I still agree with me about this. Too fine a plan or regimen will scorch them; take no action and they will drown.

The hours we are given are our nourishment prior to milk and bread. Eat, drink, enjoy!

I thank Mariss Stevens for allowing me to use images of her works for this post. To see the full set, including the mesmerising process of how she created the moon, as well as the surprise coup of the eighth work, click The Containment series.

- Silke Heiss, 27th May 2020

The sun and the avocet

Before he rose today, the sun asked the avocet -
"What have you found during your foragings this dawn?"
The avocet looked around her and, surprised that the sun showed an interest in her, reflected for a moment.
"Mr Sun," she then replied obligingly, "I have found that essentially nothing has changed. I mean, everything is the same as yesterday, and yesterday was the same as the day before."
The sun made no reply. He was busy working on a particularly delicate pale purple, whereby he wanted to announce himself to the hills on the opposite horizon.
Mistaking the sun's momentary silence for a gentle invitation to be-think herself, the avocet added, "Of course, this morning is the same, but it is also different from all others. Low tide is particularly low today, and so the parts of the lagoon where I am foraging are particularly tight with fish. The skin of the water is rippling with them, and many have been jumping, as if they had not enough space at this moment."

The sun had completed the creation of the desired pale purple.
"Ah," he said, "I like that you are so observant of others. I shall touch the water's surface now, to give it a little colour. It may help those mullet feel that their home is just a little more expansive until the high tide frees them."
He directed the light of his eye into the sky, which obediently threw a rosy spread upon the water.

"What else," he then asked the avocet, "have you discovered?"
"I hope I can satisfy your curiosity," the avocet replied a little nervously. "I will say that I have had quite a dawn of wise morsels. I must have felt this test coming."
"I am not testing you," the sun corrected the bird, "I am curious about what happens before I arrive."

"That does put a different slant on it, thank you, Mr Sun," said the avocet, humbled by the sun's frankness, and moved by the Great Light's desire to talk to her, an insignificant little wader. She paused for a moment on her long, thin legs, before continuing.
"Ok, Mr Sun, I will dredge up my deeper thoughts."
She hesitated, but then took courage. "Today I confess I thought about death," she declared quietly. "Or, not really death. I thought ... I mean, I found that when something dies," she said slowly, "it gives the time it used while living back into the world."

She paused again, not used to talking this much, and also somewhat a-wonder at the wisdoms her questioner was fetching out of her delicately up-turned beak. Then she added,
"I find this each time I eat a hermit crab. As soon as I swallow one, it fills my stomach with time that belonged to it, but which now belongs to me to find the next one."

"Very good, very good," chuckled the sun, as the colours on the lagoon became golden.
The avocet could not help but walk on her stilty legs straight into the stream of gold, because it lay directly in her path. She briefly felt herself disappear completely. It was as if she were being eaten by the light.

'Perhaps this is a bit like what the hermit crabs experience,' she said to herself, 'when they disappear in my warm body.'
But she did not tell this to the sun, who was by now a free ball in the sky, great and silent and beyond the possibility of any further communion.

'I'll save that wise morsel,' thought the avocet. 'Who knows, I may need it in the future?'

- Silke Heiss, 4th April 2020

Image of avocet: African Bird Club

A question of momentum

Time as an organic fact

One of the 'bibles' that has guided my life is the children's book, Momo (pronounced 'Mawmaw') by Michael Ende. The book is essentially a narrative about the treasure of time. The main character is an orphan girl called Momo. She is shown the origin of time in the form of 'hour-flowers'. These are literally blooms of hours that break from bud to full unfolding and, necessarily, wilting at the end of each precious hour.

Each person is allotted a specific number of hour-flowers in their lifetime. It is as momentous a concept as it is simple, shaping time as a friend, rather than a foe; as an organic fact, rather than a random invention.

To feel time as a natural sequence of moments blossoming their opportunities takes me to the freedom of an infant basking starry-eyed in a kind of milk of existence: the nourishment of life itself being nothing other than time - the hours we are given to build our selves towards as complete an end as we can.

Cover of the K.Thienemanns Verlag 1st edition, Stuttgart, 1973, by Gustav Reisacher