To turn towards devotion
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
writes Mary Oliver in the poem ‘The Summer Day’
On Wednesday we were in the path of a solar eclipse. The partial phase began around twenty to eight in the evening, reached its peak around nineteen minutes and ten seconds past eight, at 96% of totality for just under two minutes before becoming partial again, ending just before the sun began to set.
Virginia Woolf wrote of her June 1927 journey to see a solar eclipse in the 1928 essay ‘The Sun and the Fish’.
We had fallen. It was extinct. There was no colour. The earth was dead. That was the astonishing moment: & the next when as if a ball had rebounded, the cloud took colour on itself again, only a sparky aethereal colour & so the light came back. I had very strongly the feeling as the light went out of some vast obeisance; something kneeling down, & low & suddenly raised up, when the colours came. They came back astonishingly lightly & quickly & beautifully in the valley & over the hills—at first with a miraculous glittering & aetheriality, later normally almost, but with a great sense of relief. It was like recovery.
A moment of transcendent beauty and disquiet, a moment of awe, the world transformed.
I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation
Susan Sontag said more bluntly in As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980
But I wonder about ‘self’ transformation. The myth of the self-made person seems increasingly bound up with plutocrats who claim to have ‘made it’ by their own ingenuity (not mentioning the privileges they began with).
I’ve always thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson as someone who added fuel to ‘self-made’ rhetoric, but reading the diary of Louisa May Alcott the person we meet there is incredibly generous towards what she calls her ‘family of incompetents’ (excluding herself). Bronson Alcott was a brilliant Transcendentalist philosopher and speaker, but his writing was dire, and his ability to conform to any kind of work or even to make a living from his lecture tours was completely absent. After one several-months tour he returned with a profit of $1.
Revisiting Emerson’s essay ‘Self-Reliance’, his definition of self-reliance is not about wealth or productivity, but about authenticity and integrity. About trusting the quiet voice of intuition over the loud cries of society’s thrust towards conformity, which makes more sense of why he supported Bronson Alcott, a person who lived by his own compass and, in the eyes of society, was never a ‘success’.
Emerson finds the sacred in such authentic living, comparing it to the way plants live as wholly themselves, which is never a bar to co-operation and generosity, and links to his earlier essay, ‘Nature’.
At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. … The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history, or church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year.
There is something powerfully moving about the sun going dark, the birds falling silent, the atmosphere changing. Something to do with the enormity of the forces and the communality of knowing ourselves at the mercy of this vast universe and its processes.
…The world outside looked wrong, daylight thinning, colours draining to muted grey, shadows stretching long and sharp, the temperature dropping so quickly people drew blankets around themselves. […]
As totality neared, the last sickle of sun quivered like a golden eyelash, then snapped out—and the hall plunged into twilight.
The corona erupted around the black disc of the moon, white fire writhing, streaming outwards in veils, the sun bleeding light. […]
Armel stood at the back of the hall, half in shadow, watching the corona blaze. But he wasn’t seeing the sky. He was seeing Christophe’s face the night before—slack, pale… The village drew together in awe and fear as totality deepened, but Armel felt himself drift further away. This moment, this gathering, should have been shared with Flóra. … The corona arced brighter. A star appeared beside the black disk. The hall gasped. Armel felt something in him unravel and he whispered her name. Flóra… His father was dying. Mabon would wake in visions and the forest would take Flóra deeper into their language. … And in the dim, eerie half-light of totality, Armel bowed his head and let the truth break open—she belonged to the forest.
Excerpt from even till I shrink with cold, I smile, work in progress
Whilst the partial eclipse is fading I gather in the dusk to write Calmly by Candlelight with a circle of writers. We listen to a poem, Louise Glück’s “Vespers (End of August)”, write in the dim light feeling each other in a circle of far geographies. End with a card from The Wild Enchantments deck and its question:
How do I cultivate and trust intuition?
We are back with Emerson. A self enmeshed in nature acting from intuition with integrity shines a different light on Sontag’s project of self-transformation, a project that Julian of Norwich might recognise in other language:
The fruit and the purpose of prayer is to be oned with and like God in all things.
Julian doesn’t define prayer as supplication, but as transformation, and for her change occurs in relationship to the divine. She often returns to the conviction that it’s through attention to the sacred that we are drawn into love.
Julian inhabits a specific tradition that may or may not be yours. A contemporary Druid might write:
The fruit and the purpose of prayer is to be made one with and like the sacred in all things.
The ontology differs, but experientially the contemplative and relational practice binds us across traditions and language. This is not to collapse all traditions into some saccharine melting pot, but simply to ask whether, despite philosophical and doctrinal differences, there is a fundamental human impulse to pay attention to the earth, to meet otherness with reverence, to listen and cultivate relationship. To begin with what presents itself— the scent of cramp bark blossom, a winter woodland in twilight, a storming ocean… and allow meaning to unfold.
The night of the eclipse there’s a dark moon, tawny owls calling from the forest. The Perseids are at their height, illuminating the sky with their fast, fiery trails.
Sun, moon and stars, marking this otherwise ordinary day in August.
I don’t know exactly what the sacred is. Does anyone? But I’m interested in cultivating the quality of attention that allows the sacred to disclose itself, whatever its source. One that allows the ego to fall away sufficiently that we open to the mystery of the living world, where transformation lies. This is a very different kind of ‘self-transformation’. Not the loud voices calling us to pay for lifestyles that promise (as long as we’re good enough) to change us into more productive units of a society that we would do better to challenge and resist. But the quiet voices of attention, where the sacred is known not through reason, but through intimacy.
I don’t know exactly what the sacred is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to listen
to the hawthorn, how to sit with the silence.
What happens to our understanding of the sacred if we change the way we see?
Whatever the symbolic language that speaks to us, we face the same questions:
- How do we truly attend?
- What transforms us?
- How do we live well within the more-than-human world?
These are questions of incarnation, of embodiment — the place where the sacred meets the material. For me the language is of moss, calendula, blackthorn… but wherever we locate devotion, we step into a world saturated with presence.
Gather with me
Alchemical gatherings are a way of working with me with minimal commitment and maximum accessibility. Four 2-hour workshops, 12 Calmly by Candlelight gatherings and a 12-day course with a final gathering all for just £25/€28/$30 for the year.
The community is hosted on Mighty Networks with a safe forum space to share work and for other related discussions, as well as links to the zoom events and an events diary.
You can find out more on the Alchemical Gatherings page or join using the link below
(Please note: the Mighty Network forum has the name of my herbal work: triskelewell, but also hosts groups for Ktih and Alchemical Gatherings)