Meet me in the thicket

A warm welcome!

To wherever you are (turns out, anywhere you happen to be is always here)

To whomever you are (I presume, a human person, but I could be wrong)

And to whenever you are (now, as always)

Thank you for meeting me here, in the vast and wild thicket that we call being alive!

I think it is a very, singularly human notion to try to ‘understand’. To tell stories about what we see and how we feel, to use language to approximate the truth. We are flooded, after all: joyfully, boisterously, overwhelmingly, with inputs. So many senses – noise, light, warmth, memory, the linden trees blooming, the bees with their pants on are visiting the sage- and we use them to try to make sense.

Some feel that transcendence is the ultimate answer to understanding, to remove the bothersome burdens of being-ness, the mess of the down-here insides of life, to float above, to see clearly, unfettered. An over-angle that is broad, vast, all-knowing.

The thing is, though, I don’t think that anything can ever be truly known. Not all the way. Each of us experiences one another, or those blooming linden trees, from a singular perspective. We try to tell the true story of the linden by assigning language to what we saw, smelled, remembered. We use poems or songs or paintings to describe it. Yet, our smallest angle of the linden knows nothing of the polyphonic, sprawling existence of the tree itself. The linden, like anything else, is simply unknowable.

This is a quandary for us meaning-making creatures, don’t you think?

There is a philosopher named Thomas Berry who talks about understanding, or the pursuit of some small piece of it, in an opposite way from transcendence. While transcendence seeks removal from experience, inscendence asks you to wade further into it. Inscendence is the impulse to bushwhack into the thicket, to plumb the depths, to walk towards the core. Understanding through immersion: stumbling clumsily or gracefully deeper, tangling through the brambles and getting to know them one by one, thorn by thorn. Maybe you’re met with more questions than answers. That’s OK. Deeper experience is overwhelming – that’s kindof the point. Down here on planet earth, everything is loud and confusing and staggeringly beautiful. How much of the unfolding rumpus can we make ourselves available to?

We walk slowly into the meadow, the orchestra of stringed-instrument grass. Our feet are buried in the music and we crouch down to investigate. Shimmering gems of beetles, there. We look out across and see a deer, who sees us back. We are both known and unknowable to one another. Every living thing an audience in the amphitheater of the sun.

May we continue to know nothing.

May we look around with new eyes and no notions.

May we see things as they truly are – mysterious, enormous, tangled, luminous:

The ever-evolving symphony we get to be a part of.

It is all so lovely, and so terrifying, down here.

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