In “Saving Time”, Jenny Odell (who also wrote the excellent, “How to do Nothing”), writes –
“my definition of being alive is simply that: the embrace”
A long time ago I took this photo of a painted door of one of the craft shops on the Ile d’Oleron, which is only about an hour west of where I live. I loved it the moment I saw it. It’s pretty simple, really, but it captures several ideas in one little graphic. A human, in this case a young girl, encountering a sea creature, a “medusa”? They are almost kissing, looking directly into each others eyes. This is an encounter. A meeting. An interaction. The heart, the universal symbol of love, tells us that this a loving encounter. An embrace.
I think Jenny Odell is onto something….being alive is an embrace. Because everything which exists, exists in a vast web of connections and relationships, and if those relationships are loving, then they are nurtured, then they grow. The poet, Mary Oliver, says that we should pay a particular kind of attention to the world, a loving attention. She’s right.
Elsewhere in Jenny Odell’s book she quotes Harmut Rosa –
“Resonance is something that can only happen between us. Love as a resonant experience thus refers not to the fact of loving or being loved, but to the moment or moments of mutual, transformative, fluid affecting encounter” – Harmut Rosa.
I love this concept of resonance as an interaction. When we resonate with another, we create a harmony between us. We are on “the same wavelength”. And when we make that heart to heart, soul to soul, connection, then we experience moments which are both mutual, and transformative.
Resonance also occurs between us and other forms of life. That’s pretty easy to see when we consider animals. Our relationships with animals are a two way phenomenon. How we behave towards them, changes how they behave towards us, and vice versa. In fact, the resonance which can occur between humans and dogs, for example, results in the multiple ways in which a dog can become a “helper”, whether that’s to someone with partial vision, or someone who has epileptic seizures.
Doesn’t the same thing apply to plants, even? I know many people who talk to plants (though I’ve never met anyone who claims that the plants talk back to them!) but, I’m sure the benefits which accrue to plants from loving human attention, are clear to see. Any gardener will tell you so. It’s not just what The Little Prince had to say about “his rose”.
Plants, it appears, are able to respond to about fifteen different environmental factors all the time. They have elaborate, highly evolved systems of detection and response. Much more than we realised when we didn’t look close enough.
One of my favourite writers about physics, is the Italian physicist, Carlo Rovelli, (“Seven Brief Lessons on Physics” and “Reality is not What it Seems”) wrote this beautiful passage –
The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events. The difference between things and events is that things persist in time, events have a limited duration. A stone is a prototypical ‘thing’: we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not stones.
“the world is made up a networks of kisses, not stones”……..isn’t that lovely? Of course, stones only appear as “things” because they change so slowly. Every one of them came about through a sequence of events too. The “limited duration” he refers to is the timescale of a human life, mostly. There was a time when every single “thing” we see didn’t exist, and there will come a time when it ceases to exist. But in the meantime, and here’s the even more important point, I think, every “thing” is constantly changing. Maybe kisses don’t last long, but their effects can ripple out through our lives for years…..generations even!
I read Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, “The Beginning comes After the End”, this week. I love her writing, and this collection which is focused on how everything is connected to everything else, is superb. In it she writes – “A new subfield called processual biology looks at the world as made up of processes rather than objects, as phenomena forever flowing and changing and thereby exchanging with each other and changing into each other. It proposes that it is more useful and accurate to think of ourselves and most of what we call things as events.”
This strikes me as another way of saying that reality is made up of embraces, of “kisses not stones”.
Actually, I think there’s an even more important point than the fact that everything is connected to everything else and that’s the fact that absolutely everything constantly changes. Reality is a network of relationships. Each of us is a mind-bogglingly complex network of cells and molecules, constantly interacting with each other. And each of us lives in a multitude of environments, physical, psychological, social, cultural, and so on….which means we are constantly exchanging molecules, energies and information with the rest of the universe.
There is nothing I can do, say or even think, which isn’t going to send out ripples through these networks and environments and there is nothing in those environments which can be walled off to prevent them from setting off actions and reactions too.
I think that’s why we should do our best to be loving, kind and understanding, rather than judgemental, angry and hating. The former creates, stimulates and grows, the latter poisons and destroys.
How about a Mary Oliver poem? I think this one is really pertinent to this idea of life full of embraces.
On the Beach
On the beach, at dawn:
four small stones clearly
hugging each other.
How many kinds of love
might there be in the world,
and how many formations might they make
and who am I ever
to imagine I could know
such a marvelous business?
When the sun broke
it poured willingly its light
over the stones
that did not move, not at all,
just as, to its always generous term,
it shed its light on me,
my own body that loves,
equally, to hug another body.
Finally, Do you know the Canadian singer songwriter, Tenille Townes? I love her melodies, but I most especially love her lyrics. This song, somehow, also seems appropriate to include in this post. I hope you enjoy it.
