Dec 21, 2022
What if, when we lose unintelligible things, we fall apart?
Happy Winter Solstice!
🌚 Intelligibility and communication with the more-than-human.
🌚 Concerning prophecies, riddles, and parables and how they touch the heart.
🌚 About not always being clearly understood, nor understanding everything linearly.
🌚 About the deep need to be genuinely indecipherable and unintelligible.
🌚 Regarding the shape-shifting through living discourse centered in real contexts.
🌚 About the necessary paradox of open contextual roots.
🌚 Concerning letting the darkness sing.
We usually seek clarity. Our stressed binary psyches think they can let go and relax only through clearness, completion, and control of the solution — although “clarity” means capturing a moment, boxing up the unknown, and labeling it. But darkness clears categories and boundaries, blending dimensions, blindfolding clarity.
A few months ago, a Black redstart spoke to me on a clear evening.
His tiny body, with its ochre-feathered chest, vibrated as he sang, in a wide variety of melodies and sounds, while perched on a wall.
He spoke, and I listened.
The binary mind tends to think that clarity and linear conclusions are the only reason or way to communicate — the Black redstart sang, and I didn’t understand a word. Yet, I listened. Vibrating, shaken, and humbled by the unfolding relationship. And he spoke with his whole vibrating body.
He sang.
He looked up at me from his tiny body and feathers and continued to sing. I was mesmerized in awe.
So, I continued to listen.
We are neighbors and live in the same neighborhood, but I have never been this close to him.
This is where clarity gets in the way of communication.
Communication is about belonging, and it’s about being together.
I didn’t understand a word. But I heard it. And to this day, his song stays with me.
So my question is, what do we lose if we only strive for clarity?
What do we forget if we are always trying to be intelligible?
The symbiotic language of relationships is interstitial and non-verbal.
What if there is an “unintelligible clarity”? Always contextual, rooted in place and ecology, niches, habitats and weather patterns, topography and culture, imagination and dreams. I should also recall the translocal archaic traditions of oracular bird watching as part of the seasonal eco-systemic literacy of any given place. The direct connection and symbiotic relation with the land and waters form the thick mythical layers of contextual cultures. This is ancient wisdom.
🌚 What if, when we lose unintelligible things, we fall apart?
🌚 What if we lose the bridges to mystery when we lose incomprehensible things?
🌚 What if, when we relinquish indecipherable realms, darkness swallows us? Instead of holding and nurturing our dreams and omens?
🌚 What if darkness is the unintelligible creation thread, not needing translation?
