a short echo
I haven’t written in a while, not because I didn’t want to, but because life has been moving too fast. And after the obligatory Christmas break that forces everyone to slow down, it feels as though that quiet is already slipping through my hands, with yet another rush waiting for us.
I don’t want to wake up much these days. Even the winter sun sparkling in the London sky doesn’t faze me, as I’d rather stay in my dreams. It isn’t depression. That inner world is often filled with adventure and subconscious messages, sometimes uncomfortable, but full of wonder nonetheless. It feels like having the ability to breathe underwater, so you aren’t afraid to descend into the depths of your own oceans.
There is no real escape from the external world. Although I am better at accepting it now, I still have my moments. The intercostal strain on my left rib, along with recently uncovered truths I had long sensed, unsettled me all over again. Not being able to release and recover immediately, and having to simply observe, is one of the hardest practices.
A yoga teacher friend once mentioned that intercostal strains can be emotionally linked to bottled-up feelings around the heart. That may well be the case, along with the ego’s desire to achieve and achieve, staying in the asana for the sake of applause, approval, physical accomplishment, and vanity. Life cannot be made of constant highs, nor of an endless pursuit of the next streak of happiness.
Writing grounds me. I don’t want to be fully seen, yet I do want to exist, and release some words and thoughts out there like an echo.
The city, its pace, and its often solitary, contact-averse culture can make me feel more isolated, even as it keeps me comfortably tucked away. I love solitude, after all. Still, I am here. I remind myself that life is bigger, and so are some people’s hearts. They are simply hidden from the immediate eye.
Language, a principally left-hemisphere function, tends, as Nietzsche said, to 'make the uncommon common': the general currency of vocabulary returns the vibrant multiplicity of experience to the same few, worn coins. Poetry, however, by its exploitation of non-literal language and connotation, makes use of the right hemisphere's faculty for metaphor, nuance and a broad, complex field of association to reverse this tendency. 'Poetry', in Shelley's famous formulation, 'lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar... It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.' - Iain McGilchrist, The Master And His Emissary