“Occult Power of the Alphabet”
In last month’s post, remake your world with words, we talked about the change-making potential of words and story. In this New Year’s post we will continue with this idea, sparked by another line from Gregory Orr’s poetry: the occult power of the alphabet. How can words, letters and stories become allies for hope and vision in this new year? Here is the first stanza of a much longer poem by Gregory Orr:
Occult power of the alphabet —
How it combines
And recombines into words
That resurrect the beloved
Every time.
The image of making words and recombining them, the feeling of resurrecting the beloved, stops me and fills me with desire to combine and recombine words. To feel the presence of the beloved. The last line of this stanza is only two words: every time. It resonates because this line is not folded into one compound word, but is two separate words with a pause in the middle. This vanquishes any doubt about the beloved returning. Now I am convinced that what the poem says is true; the alphabet, writing, has the power to resurrect the beloved every time — I only have to be willing to stay with it, to wait, to make myself an instrument, to be devoted to the time it takes.
The great wave is in waiting for any boat…
The worst is not to be overwhelmed by disaster, but to fail to live by principle.
— Sister Wendy Beckett
“Remake Your World With Words”
Winter Solstice, the darkest night of the year, returns me to the theme of stars, night, silence and time. This painting was inspired by Gregory Orr, from one of his many untitled poems in Concerning the Book Which is the Body of the Beloved. Any of you, if you have written for long periods of time, know the power of words to create a spell.
Let’s remake the world with words.
Not frivolously, nor
To hide from what we fear,
But with a purpose.
The Third Thing
This post is about the magic of number three, and how it applies to makers.
My online class, A Grain of Hope, just finished. We talked briefly about the numbers 1, 2 and 3 — the unity of one, the duality of two and the possibility of breakthrough with three. I will focus on three, the third thing, and give some examples, but first I want to lay the groundwork with number two:
Two brings both relationship and the trap of dualistic thinking. Two deceptions that we makers, and probably most humans, fall into are perfectionism and comparison. That is, how trying to be perfect, or comparing ourselves with others, leads to endless unresolved spirals in the mind. In this setup, we are never good enough, or even when we are, it’s only for brief moments. These mind-weeds leave no ground for the third thing. We get stuck in the thicket of good-bad, right-wrong, and pretty-ugly tangles in our mind. It is tiring. These mind-weeds stop us in the studio and at our writing desk.
What follows are some examples of puncturing duality with the third thing.