The Sunset with Gibbie: Freedom

This essay first appeared in Regent College’s student paper, the Etcetera, November 15, 2011. 

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Into the silence, which was also at times a roar, of my thoughts and questions forever returning to myself to search there for an explanation of my life and its purpose, into this concentrated tiny hub of dense silent noise, came the cackle of a hen from a nearby back garden, and at that moment that cackle, its distinct sharp-edge existence beneath a blue sky with white clouds, induced in me an intense awareness of freedom.” – from ‘Field’ by John Berger

In 1971 author and art critic John Berger wrote a strange little piece entitled Field which explores an experience which he thinks is universal and recognizable by all. My opening quote describes one example of the experience of mundane particularities that provide a sense of freedom or happiness. He describes other contexts in which it happens: being sung to sleep, lazily observing a field across the road or being caught at a train-crossing for a few moments in order to observe what happens in the field that is formed on two sides by the road and the rail-line. In each case there is a minimum amount of order that occupies the mind, just enough to provide a context in which an event takes place that itself brings attention to that context.

Berger sketches the physical context in which this experience is most likely to happen as a lightly bounded grass field with, “an attendant openness to events.” He claims that “the experience does not enter into the narrative of your life…on the contrary, this narrative is interrupted. The visible extension of the field in space displaces awareness of your own lived time.” Searching for a way that this is accomplished, Berger writes, in his last couple of lines, that “Suddenly an experience of disinterested observation opens in its centre and gives birth to a happiness which is instantly recognizable as your own. The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life.”

After years of puzzling over this little essay I have come to think that what is happening here is the reverse of what might be suggested in Berger’s last line. The field appears to have the same proportions as your own life because the experience of one’s own life is changed. It takes on, or is supplanted by, the proportions of the field. Instead of the “dense silent noise” of the reduced narrative that is always playing, there is a lightly bounded space that is open at the edges to new events. The self-referentiality of our individual narratives is broken, to be subsumed by the field before which we stand.

This is the same reversal of belonging that I felt in the presence of Gibbie and the sunset last year on Galiano Island. This reversal, in which the scene suddenly reaches through our field of perception and claims us as its own, results in an experience of freedom. It tells us something true about our actual relationship to the world around us. In the same way that a momentary forgetting can help me see what is really there, so this kind of experience can help me see the truth that I belong to the context of each day. If this is so, there is no work to be done to justify my existence.

Simply put, when the ego meets with the reality of the particular, it’s strategies to maintain its own existence seem laughable. When we meet with the truth of that belonging, this pursuit is dissolved into an experience of a place in which to live and grow in a world much bigger than our constricting anxieties.

We can all assent to these things intellectually – of course we belong to a greater reality, of course we exist – but an experience of it is another thing entirely. It brings that truth into our heart and our gut and our body. The experience of the ‘field’ provides a discernible structure out of which particularity and freedom are born.

Such as just now, when, looking out the window from the kitchen table in my friends’ third-floor flat, I see a crow glide down from the roof above my head to the small tree across the road, a handful of yellow leaves still holding out against the cold and the wind. Have you ever noticed that a crow rarely alights on a branch from above, but always comes from below in an swoop before pulling up hard, black body perpendicular to sight, wings in full spread to attain the branch?

We are surrounded by these details, these particularities, that make up a world much richer than our concrete overlay. In this world we find the freedom from the pursuits of our ego, freedom to turn and lay down our constricted narratives in repentance, freedom to bracket our use of cyberspace, freedom to risk much to glimpse our role in social change and freedom to let the other require something from us in our communities. This is the inner freedom that is graced: the action of a God that continually sustains us and his world in this connection of belonging that we would finally learn to accept it from his hand as gift, as a healing gift.

So, walk with me up the path to the bouldered edge with sweet – and slightly neurotic – Gibbie. Sit down and watch the gold explode into light on the inky surface of the swells. Follow the light trail back up, millions of tiny novas, back up to the sun itself, low and bright. Glance over and watch Gibbie watching the sunset. See the long light give attention to the trees along the shore to your right: how each tree basks and absorbs the attention, how each leaf and each limb stand out distinct. Then realize that you too, bask and absorb and stand out in the late evening’s rays. Take this realization as gift.

The Sunset with Gibbie: Sharing

This article first appeared in Regent College’s student paper, the Etcetera, November 8, 2011.

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There is something about sharing a scene of beauty with another living thing that sets that beauty in proper context, or rather, that enables us to inhabit the greater context that a particular beautiful scene always inhabits. I was able to enjoy that sunset on Galiano last year partially because of the bracketing of perception involved in forgetting what I was seeing in order to see it anew, but the presence of Gibbie the dog was, I think, a more crucial reason.

I remember that throughout the entire experience I was uniquely aware of Gibbie and aware of the way that he was alert and looking in the same direction as I. I have been trying to make sense of that particular awareness ever since. At first, I thought maybe it was a simple instance of companionship, an easing of loneliness in the moment through the ministrations of ‘man’s best friend’. But I have come to believe that it was more than this, or at least more than our common conception of it. All I could say was that I somehow felt validated in my experience because of his presence, but validated is still not quite the right word.

So the experience remains thus: the presence of a dog helped me to relax into the moment enough to witness the particularity of a sunset. The fact that Gibbie was there bringing whatever sight and awareness a dog possesses to bear on the same scene that I saw, opened the scene to me. In other words, Gibbie brought his own doggy horizon to the scene which overlapped but did not coincide with mine and thus helped break open my horizon to the particularity of that day’s sunset.

I use the word ‘horizon’ here as a phenomenological term meaning the field of perception that we bring to any given act of perceiving. Think of it as a ‘point of view’ on steroids; it is a point of view that provides the backdrop against which we can see and understand what we see. The problem begins with the fact that this horizon is invisible to us and we merely assume what it gives. Once this horizon, in its invisibility, becomes closely wedded to our developed sense of self everything begins to be subsumed to our view of things, to the story we are telling ourselves about ourselves. All too often for me, sunsets and other bits of beauty become mere accompaniments to my story, and that means death to any appreciation of particularity. They become instead twisted universals, meant to stand in as a prop or plot device in a reduced personal story that I control.

So, to return to that evening, I now see that as another living thing not easily circumscribed by my sense of self – as he is, afterall, not my dog – Gibbie’s presence brought an outside particularity to the scene that was much less reducible to my own horizon then the scene itself. As I could not reduce Gibbie to my own horizon, so I could not reduce the sunset scene itself, of which Gibbie was both a part and a partaker.

Furthermore, and this is the next critical step, allowing Gibbie his presence and horizon meant that I became a part of the scene as well. Understanding, at a deep level, that I also was both part and partaker of the sunset allowed me to participate fully in the moment, as I accepted my own place in that scene.

Once again, I had reason to sense, as I sat above the water, before the trees, beside the dog and under the long light, that the scene before me belonged uniquely to itself and, in belonging to itself, included me. Understanding this about the sunset enabled me to bring myself to the scene instead of the other way around. Bringing myself to the scene means that I do not leave behind my concerns, or the story of my life, but that those things become firmly situated against a greater set of events, a greater sense of reality. My own story becomes set within a larger story; it belongs to the story arc of the day and belongs to its beauty.

This is the power of sharing, that – whether it be your legos with your friend when you were seven years old, an amazing Wilkenson class with new friends, or a sunset scene with a dog – it can open the world around us and wrest it away from our grasping hands to be returned to us, changed and charged with the particular that calls us to our own presence in the moment. This is also perhaps the deeper meaning of companionship, and perhaps of the role of ‘man’s best friend’, even in a city where dogs are, all too often, merely the next accessory to a chosen lifestyle.

To bracket and to share, in order that the relationship between us and the world can come into the right focus: next week I shall try to gather these thoughts and show how they can result in an experience of the possibility of our own inner freedom, the sort of freedom that is crucial to things such as repentance, living well with cyberspace, participating in community and protest movements.

The Sunset with Gibbie: Forgetting

This essay first appeared in Regent College’s student paper, the Etcetera, November 1, 2011.

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Sharing a sunset with the Wilkenson’s dog, Gibbie, was one of my most significant experiences of the last 12 months. I would like to think aloud about why it was so.

This essay begins a three-part meditation on this experience and though you might think that it is out of place alongside conversations about the Occupy Movement, or the challenge of technology, I trust that by the end of the cycle you’ll understand why sharing a sunset with a dog or anyone else might be crucial to those very challenges.

The problem for me, right up front, is that I am rarely able to relax into the moment of appreciating a particular experience of beauty, be it a good sunset, the North Shore mountains on a clear day or a painting in The Lookout Gallery. After all, sunsets, to return to our particular example, happen every day. Do we enjoy each one on its own terms? We have likely each seen hundreds of good sunsets and I think we tend to rate them automatically in our heads by comparison or their intensity and variety of colour, by the texture of the clouds or their duration. This experience however was very different. The sun was low and intense beyond Wallace island and for the first time in a very long time I was able to live into the scene in quietness.

Living in Creation class was over for the weekend on Galiano Island, and those leaving had left for the ferry, supper preparations were an hour or so away and those of us staying—the extra glorious day—had scattered to various activities. I decided to go watch the sunset along the cliff path and was delighted when Gibbie came along. We climbed up to the bouldered edge and I sat down to watch while Gibbie lay down a couple feet away and was content to take in the scene himself. We watched for a good half an hour as the sun sank behind the low hills on the other islands and then, as if deciding together, we both rose and continued along the path to make a big loop back to the house.

The first reason why I was able to relax into the scene was a bit of a “strategy of seeing” that I stumbled upon that evening. I would look almost straight down from the cliff at the water below, unfocus my eyes for a second, and forget what I was looking at. Without knowing what they were already, the reflections of the sun on water became thousands of tiny explosions of light, supernovas against a dark backdrop of space. In fact, even that description is a secondary explanation; what I saw was a singular beauty in the form of brilliant sparkling light against an undulating dark depth.

After a few moments of this beauty, I would look up and instantly take in the whole scene: low brilliant sun over the opposite hills, trees standing out distinct in that quality of light along the length of shore to my right. The explosions of light would be reconnected back to the whole vista in their place as the wide trail of reflections of the sunset over the water. But this reconnection could take place with the added intensification of the particular unique beauty of the reflection of a low sun on the waves of the ocean.

This cycle between an experience of the disconnected particular beauty and the experience of its reconnection to the whole scene enabled me to see the sunset anew. I was able to see as if for the first time the special beauty of a sunset over water. More to the point, I was able to see for the first time precisely because it was for the first time. That sunset, in its beauty, in its own context of that day and that season, belonged uniquely to itself. This is what all good seeing teaches us. The cycles of nature, the seasons, of life and death and birth, happen in a spiral; they give us a discernible structure out of which particularity is born that deserves its own. Each thing is new, distinct.

This strategy of seeing was a way for me to see what was really there.

There was, of course, another reason that I, amidst anxieties and distractions, could fully enjoy the sunset that evening and that reason was the presence of Gibbie, the dog. More on that reason next week.

The Kindle vs. The Book.

This essay first appeared in Regent College’s student paper, the Etcetera, October 25th, 2011.

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“The most elegant feature of a physical book is that it disappears while you’re reading. Immersed in the author’s world and ideas, you don’t notice a book’s glue, the stitching, or ink. Our top design objective is to make Kindle disappear — just like a physical book — so you can get lost in your reading, not the technology.” -Kindle advertisement http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0051QVF7A?country=CA

One of the primary questions coming out of the Laing Lectures last week was the scope of the difference between cyberspace and preceding information technology such as the book. Is there a real and significant difference with cyberspace that fundamentally changes the way that we interact with reality? I want to pursue an answer to this through a comparison between the book and the Kindle. The advantage of using the Kindle in this discussion is that it allows us to bracket out the many other levels to the question, as well as other issues involved in the internet, in order to focus on the more basic question regarding the nature of the screen as portal.

The crucial difference is in this one simple and obvious observation: the one is a portal that opens onto a world that remains the same, and the other is a portal that opens onto a world that is always in flux. In the case of the Kindle, the same physical object is a portal onto an endless variety of text-based media. This is precisely the location of Dr. Borgmann’s description of cyberspace as limitless reality or distance-less space. It is limitless because the physical space of the object no longer corresponds with a particular and bounded world. Of course, a book can transcend time and space to bring us into conversation with an ancient author. To notice this is to notice again the wonder of the written word. The point is that it does so to bridge our particularity with another particularity. The Kindle, or any other device with a screen, transcends time and space to bridge our particularity with endless possibilities. Any discussion of the nature of cyberspace needs to answer the question of whether this simple difference changes the way that we interact with that world.

I know, in a basic bodily form, that my copy of Augustine’s Confessions is different than my issue of the latest Rolling Stone—should I in fact possess one—by the fact that it comes in different objects. On a Kindle, the difference is less apparent. In the same way, the difference between Augustine as an author, and particular authority, and the author of any particular article in the Rolling Stone is also less apparent because it comes from the same ‘world’ through the same screen.

The particularity of the physical book, on the other hand, assists us in treating the world into which it is a portal in its particularity. Of course, the particularity of my copy does not compare with the original manuscript. For those of us who attended last year’s Laing Lecture series with Susan Wise Bauer, we can remember her point that each shift in the medium of the written word lost something of its connection to the author. For Dr. Bauer, this history was a way to realize that the written word has always survived these changes and will do so again. However, the crucial difference here is that in this shift to the screen as portal we lose physical boundedness itself. We need to search for a way of supplementing this loss, particularly for those for whom the encounter with words on a screen predate and outweigh the encounter with words on a page. Whatever the relative merit of my example, I suggest that we all need to interrogate our experience of the screen as portal. We should also, as Dr. Borgmann repeatedly stressed, see clearly what it might be doing to those less able, without prior experience, to negotiate the difference.

The possibility, should e-readers entirely take-over, is that the tradition and conversation of literature represented by each physical book should dissolve into a mere but vast storehouse of prose – ready at hand, but not ready to hand —an undifferentiated mess of words.

It is in this way also, that the limitless reality of cyberspace can facilitate a temptation towards our own subjective unboundedness. The book in its extension of our subjective space, nevertheless returns us to our bodily space when we close its pages, it does so by returning to its own ‘bodily’ space, by returning to its own unmoving physical particularity. We need to make sure that when we close the lids to our laptops or shut of the Kindle we can make a similar return back from the limitless and changing reality we enter through those screens.

As a way of combating these losses, we might hear again Dr. Watt’s observation that some of these issues might be divided along the lines of those who have worked on the internet and those who haven’t. I take this to mean that those who work in the industry have a better understanding of the physical space that cyberspace does actually represent, such as the square miles of Google server centres. My sense though, is that even this correlation between the physical structure of the internet and the ‘world’ to which our screens is a portal does not quite fit our vision of reality in a way adequate to the challenge. This is in part because the industry itself would like to downplay this correlation, to make the technology ‘disappear’. In other words, for the great majority of us the ‘world’ to which we go in cyberspace is still wholly incommensurate with the physical space taken up by the internet.

Some many months ago, I found the quote above on the Amazon website and it struck me as just plain wrong. A book does not wholly disappear, its very physical reality is always present as a stable gateway into a particular world. The real irony with that quote, as was pointed out to me by my friend Nathan, is that we might indeed get lost, but precisely in the technology and not our reading. The more that the technology disappears from our sight, the greater this possibility. The same has always been true for any technology.

Remembering a Life: My Grandma and Jurgen Moltmann

How do we take stock of a life?

My Grandma was fourteen when she first left home to begin working and she didn’t stop until a year and a half before she died. Up until those final two years she maintained a large garden and made sure that none of its bounty ever went to waste, including baking some eighty pies during one year when the apple tree and the saskatoon bush were both particularly productive. Given how she worked, we all knew that it was an open question as to whether she would adapt well to the relative inactivity of the retirement home. She did better than some of us thought she would, but still, it wasn’t long.

I have been trying to gain a sense of her life, to understand it and to witness its dignity, but I didn’t know her well, didn’t grow up going ‘over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house.’ So living close by in the last decade gave me the chance to get to know her a little bit better. We would have soup and a sandwich at the local college coffee-shop together using the coupons she would receive in exchange for her volunteer hours at the college mail room. Always finding places where she could be useful, she would fold newsletters and stuff them into envelopes, her hands strong, wrinkled with veins blue beneath age-thin skin. We would eat together and I would ask her questions about her younger years; she would reply with stories about working at a bakery near the airport in Calgary during the war, and about the handsome young airmen that would come in looking for coffee and a pastry.

How can I conceive of what these stories mean and the dignity that my Grandma’s life carried? The problem is, I am still young and the possibilities of my future seem to carry more weight, more reality than the passed possibility of my her life. How much more is this true after her death? How much more real to me is the present I live within now, than the past to which my Grandma’s earthly life belongs? As human beings, we are oriented towards the future and so to make sense of the past remains difficult. How to describe her life, to understand it, without romanticizing it?

Jurgen Moltmann helps me out in this regard. In his chapter on time in God in Creation, he speaks of the tyranny of the present inherent in our simple classification of time into future, present and past. In response to this he begins to line up the words beside each other: the present past, the present future, the future future. The point of his formulations is to help us understand that each event, each action, each point of time has its own set of pasts and futures. This seems obvious, but we don’t often thing in this way. The category that interests me here is the ‘past present.’ My Grandma’s life did not happen in the past, as if the reality of her life must always and only be related to my present moment. Instead, her life has its own category. She lived in the past present. It was, and is, a present and it had its own future, its own set of possibilities. This enables me to celebrate her life not in relation to my own present or, indeed, in relation to the invigorating possibilities of my own future, but instead, in relation to the dignity of her own time, in the moments of her own days that are not so much lost as hidden from view. As in all good things, my Grandma’s life had her time and she had her hope, for this all hangs on the category of the eschatological future which gathers all our possibilities into one.

All that is required of me is to witness to the time that my Grandma had, to witness to the dignity it always-already carries. It reminds me that actuality is always, in fact, more beautiful than possibility.

My favourite moments with my Grandma were when I could see her in the company of her children: my aunts, my uncle and my father. In the presence of her children she had the fruits of much of her work for much of her history with her. In the freedom of this goodness, and in the freedom of her older age, she became, in small moments, a little girl giggling over a mischievous thought or deed. Her laughter did not happen in the abstract or in the idealized moment of my memory; they happened in their own time. There was, and is, a time for conversation around the dinner table, a time for grandmothers, a time for turning thirty, a time for turning sixty-two or ninety-one, a time for living and a time for dying, and a time for rising again.

The Title Post

“But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away / Let the other yew be shaken and reply.”  -from ‘Ash Wednesday’ by T.S. Eliot.

Welcome to ‘the other yew’.

I have moved here from far away lands.  I have come for a new space.  We each have our histories, but for now at least, let us begin simply and quietly.

The sun has set outside as I write but there is a light blue glow on the western horizon.  Small masses of dark clouds are being blown about what was a clear sky by the wind that also makes the trees dance.  It feels like the sort of wind that brings in the storm but I think it is just playing as the darkness descends.

In an interview on CBC last year, Moby, said this line, ‘without caveats I can’t get out of bed in the morning.”  My brother showed the clip to me and I laughed out loud at this line, as he knew I would, because I’m often the same way.  At times it is the sign of wanting to communicate correctly and clearly; at other times it is the sign of an unclear will, a communicative hedging of bets.  I feel that I have been guilty of the second too often. I realize that this, itself, is a sort of caveat(an expectoration, if you will) but I wish to make less caveats in my writing.   I wish to write clearly and simply.

”Let the other yew be shaken and reply”

I wish to be the other yew.  I wish to be shaken and I wish to reply.

You are welcome to join me.