Trinity of blogposts 3 A flash of ancient insight (on earth as it is in heaven)

 “Look how much a weed in a crack

has influenced you,” she said.

The epigraph of this article derives from a recent blogpost I shared, in which a Journey through dance I’d signed up for triggered an early childhood memory of a miniscule, flowering weed, which had ‘spoken’ to me, saying it was from the stars. William Blake, in his Auguries of Innocence, confirms in the first four lines of the poem the inherent emotional logic of such an experience:
 

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour. 

This article is not concerned, however, with the similitude between the design of the cosmos and a single, earthly bloom, as perceived by a three-year-old child. It is concerned with the concept and phenomenon of influence, that is to say, with the experience that the flowering weed ‘spoke to me’ – in such a way, moreover, as to have a profound and lasting effect.

The original meaning of the word, ‘influence’ – deriving from the Latin influere, to flow in – does not convey the image of water. Rather, ‘influence’ was used to describe the power to produce an effect “in indirect or intangible ways”, “without the apparent exertion of force or direct exercise of command”, so we read in Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary.

My Shorter Oxford Dictionary highlights the use of the term first and foremost in Astrology, where it denoted the “supposed flowing from the stars of an ethereal fluid acting upon the character and destiny of men, and affecting sublunary things generally.” It adds that in later times, the term applied to the exercise of “occult power”. Subsequent usage shows that the term continues, over the centuries, to be associated with the operation of exertion that is “unseen” except in its effects; or the “capacity of producing effects by insensible or invisible means.”

These definitions are borne out by the online etymology dictionary, which notes that the use of the word in Middle English was limited to describing “any outflowing of energy that produces effect, of fluid or vaporous substance as well as immaterial or unobservable forces” – in other words, usage in this case referred only to the elemental, and not the human, world. I am interested here in particular in the phrase “any outflowing of energy that produces effect”.

The burgeoning literature and audio-visual material available on the power of human thought have made the fact of the ‘invisible’ or ‘insensible’ influence of both conscious and unconscious human thought one of the central concerns in contemporary human culture – from mystic, religious, spiritual, psychic, psychological, artistic, literary, philosophical, biological, neurological, chemical and, even, mathematical perspectives (i.e. the attempt to find the numerical formula required to calculate the number of human beings needed for a prayer in a specific situation to take effect.)

The knowledge that we are, in the words of Dr Zach Bush, “columns of water”, and the tremendously active focus on conscious breath-work amongst health-conscious and philosophically- or spiritually-oriented human beings across the globe in this day and age, includes us as a species, arguably, yet easily, in the “fluid or vaporous substance[s]” from which energy can flow out to produce an effect.

It's hardly a one-way street, however. Three years ago – despite skepticism – I had my astrological birth chart mapped and interpreted for me. Ever since, I have consulted the astrologer annually for what you could call a kind of check-in to the year ahead. She offers ‘trends’ and ‘currents’, which I have the choice to be aware of, if I should experience these in my personal life. One of the most influential moments during these readings was at the last one, when I revealed to her that I felt I suffered a lifelong addiction to romance (love, magic and beauty) and that I was eager to wean myself of this addiction. She informed me that the fact that my birth chart shows the planet Venus in Taurus, in opposition to Neptune, would naturally render me prone to an insatiable longing for oneness – oneness with love, with nature, with beauty, with all that lives. She observed that this longing would likely be so vast that it could not possibly be fulfilled by another living human being. It would therefore be wise to channel it into nurturing a spiritual oneness with nature and/ or my relationship with the Divine. Of course, my nature poems do (mostly) exactly that, and my habit of communing with biological and elemental nature alike, does indeed satisfy my need for being-at-one-with-all (the Divine as well as the Earthly) in a timeless, or eternal, zone.

An astrological explanation of an innate tendency is, of course, only one perspective among a variety of possible ones, which could potentially provide a similar, or even an identical insight.

Depending on whether you inspect the phenomenon of a flowering weed ‘speaking’ to a child about the stars from an artistic, mystical, spiritual, religious, psychic, psychological, philosophical, biological, neurological, chemical, or mathematical perspective, you will use your field-specific language and vocabulary to probe this phenomenon; although I hazard that a mathematical induction would be the most foundational. The chances are that none of those perspectives would cancel any other. In concert, they might create a complex bouquet of new formulae – verbal, musical, visual or diagrammatic, as well as numerical – of insight into the power of the human mind – not necessarily only as a driver, but, indeed, as a receptacle of thought: as a direct result, for example, of the influence of a (not even ingested) vegetable substance upon it. Whether such receptivity is affected by the heavenly bodies whose energy streamed into that mind, at the moment of her birth on the planet, offers a further, valid path of enquiry. There is, I posit, a measurable give-and-take between our consciousness and our – both organic as well as elemental – environment.

Certainly the sounds and rhythms used to explore these notions with you, dear reader, by means of the English language, have been chosen with the intention of effecting the greatest possible curiosity, not to say fascination, in you.

I trust that this article is a miniscule seed, gifted by a miniscule weed, assisting in the birth of a radically new order of seeing – a ‘miraculous’ order of infinitely various forms of influence. This order of seeing is, I think, already well under way.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour. – William Blake 

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