Re-imagining

I went to the wood to spend time with Kairos, but first I did yoga under another oak. I was listening to Robert Macfarlane's Is a River Alive?, which I thoroughly recommend. It's wonderfully written and he reads the Audible version himself, and that adds to the pleasure.

Anyway, what I have been working on, and is humming at the back of my mind whatever I am doing, is something about urban foxes. I was inspired in part by ted Hughes' poem The Thought Fox, in which the fox is a metaphor for creativity or imagination. And I have been thinking about how we imagine foxes in ways that demean them and allow us to dominate them. I wanted to offer an alternative view of a thought fox, an alternative type of imagining.

As I was listening, Macfarlane quoted Tacitus, "They created a desolation and called it peace." And I thought how that kind of fits with what I have been mulling over. Then he said this:

"Somehow we need to find new kinds of imagining. New ways of being that will leave us less alone in this world, less the desolate lords of Tacitus’ Victory Field. Our aliveness, as well as all life that lies beyond the human, is at stake in this."

I walked up by the Goddess Oak, who told me I have to let a part of me die. She was being uncharacteristically compassionate. I asked what part? And she said I didn't need to know, just to feel it.

I realised that Kairos is letting a part of himself die.

He seemed to suggest that I need to let go of ambition and hope. That is indeed hard. And painful.

Truly a matter of making peace with the darkness.

From The Matter With Things:

[I]n The Vision of God (De visione Dei): for example, Nicholas writes Hence I observe how needful it is for me to enter into the darkness, and to admit the coincidence of opposites, beyond all the grasp of reason, and there to seek the truth where impossibility meeteth me … And, particularly movingly, to my way of thinking, I begin, Lord, to behold Thee in the door of the coincidence of opposites, which the angel guardeth that is set over the entrance into Paradise.172 In these passages Cusanus suggests the need to enter into a darkness of unknowing which is also the door to Paradise – itself a coincidence of opposites – accessible only to whomever is able to abjure finally the attempt to apprehend God through reason (at least in as much as that is of the kind that precludes the possibility of ‘opposites’ being true). God is beyond the familiar domain where opposites hold sway: in God they are reconciled. Thus it is that the darkness is in reality a form of extreme brightness. In the mystical literature, God is often described in these terms. Dionysius the Areopagite, in his Mystica theologia, wrote of ‘the superessential Radiance of the Divine Darkness … the superessential Darkness which is hidden by all the light that is in existing things’.173 Much later, in the seventeenth century, the mystical poet Henry Vaughan, whose work is impregnated with imagery of light and dark (the title of his great collection of poems Silex Scintillans means ‘the flint that yields a spark’) wrote: ‘There is in God (some say) / A deep, but dazzling darkness…’.

Again the muntjacs circled and a different squirrel ate the offerings while I was there. This one, a male, grabbed them and ran fifteen yards away to eat them, his back resolutely turned.

On the way back, I saw a young buzzard rise from the golden stubble and flap back to the woodland. He was probably scavenging the dead little creatures killed by the big machines. How we create a desolate place and call it peace.