On a walk with one of my sons last February we were discussing how it feels to lose our inner balance, the frustration of going from feeling steady and disposed to peace, able to think without becoming caught up or wound up, to feeling like it's all slipped away. We've lost our footing and now our peaceful days are over—all we have left is the disquiet of our loss and the longing to return to that comfortable place.
this is powerful stuff. and thank you for introducing me to the charnel ground. how did i live all these years and not hear of that? "what's next" is an apt reminder to stay curious. life happens for us and not to us after all. really the perfect essay to help assuage my own temporary groundlessness. thank you Leah! ❤️
Jul 18, 2022·edited Jul 18, 2022Liked by Leah Rose
What a haunting metaphor - the charnel ground - for the spiritual place where chaos reigns and peace seems gone forever. I won't forget that. You have vividly represented it.
I am a little more than a third of the way through a book that I want to offer to you as a possible way to add an unexpected dimension to your assertion "that life is truly a process, peace is always a practice." With the exception of one book I read many years ago nothing I've come across has so deeply illuminated the place from which experience flows and so altered for me both what I see and the way I see it. Calling that "what I think" is too narrow. It's more like "how I think" - except that even the verb "think" is too narrow. You address that place in the final paragraphs of this essay, and your writing makes evident the power of it. You're writing an essay, so you're constrained by not just the linear-ish form of the essay but also the object-orientation-ishness of words and sentences. Clearly it's not merely "remembering" that all is well, even though... it is also remembering that all is well.
I want to be a little less abstract here, and more personal. I've spent many years trying to find a way to think about what I do every day that will relieve the massive anxiety I live with that I'll wake up one day and discover that I irrevocably squandered the opportunity that was my life. The prospect of dying from covid, or anything else for that matter, doesn't trouble me nearly as much as the fear that I just didn't do enough, that I took all the opportunity I had and just... frittered it away. That's my charnel ground.
Anyway, reading this book ("The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World" by Iain McGilchrist; Yale University Press, 2009) has done more than anything I've come across in decades to reconstitute the system in which I experience (my) life and that whole question about what's enough. The transition through to the other side of fear and anxiety that you describe in your essay resonates with the reaction I'm having to this book's representation of human experience's essentially dual construction. I have, until now, always thought of myself as living in a mostly unitary "house of being." I now find myself reconsidering that entire model.
this is powerful stuff. and thank you for introducing me to the charnel ground. how did i live all these years and not hear of that? "what's next" is an apt reminder to stay curious. life happens for us and not to us after all. really the perfect essay to help assuage my own temporary groundlessness. thank you Leah! ❤️
What a haunting metaphor - the charnel ground - for the spiritual place where chaos reigns and peace seems gone forever. I won't forget that. You have vividly represented it.
I am a little more than a third of the way through a book that I want to offer to you as a possible way to add an unexpected dimension to your assertion "that life is truly a process, peace is always a practice." With the exception of one book I read many years ago nothing I've come across has so deeply illuminated the place from which experience flows and so altered for me both what I see and the way I see it. Calling that "what I think" is too narrow. It's more like "how I think" - except that even the verb "think" is too narrow. You address that place in the final paragraphs of this essay, and your writing makes evident the power of it. You're writing an essay, so you're constrained by not just the linear-ish form of the essay but also the object-orientation-ishness of words and sentences. Clearly it's not merely "remembering" that all is well, even though... it is also remembering that all is well.
I want to be a little less abstract here, and more personal. I've spent many years trying to find a way to think about what I do every day that will relieve the massive anxiety I live with that I'll wake up one day and discover that I irrevocably squandered the opportunity that was my life. The prospect of dying from covid, or anything else for that matter, doesn't trouble me nearly as much as the fear that I just didn't do enough, that I took all the opportunity I had and just... frittered it away. That's my charnel ground.
Anyway, reading this book ("The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World" by Iain McGilchrist; Yale University Press, 2009) has done more than anything I've come across in decades to reconstitute the system in which I experience (my) life and that whole question about what's enough. The transition through to the other side of fear and anxiety that you describe in your essay resonates with the reaction I'm having to this book's representation of human experience's essentially dual construction. I have, until now, always thought of myself as living in a mostly unitary "house of being." I now find myself reconsidering that entire model.
A very thoughtful essay, thank you.
This is beautiful Leah:
…. life is truly a process, peace is always a practice, and I will be okay.
We all will be okay.