Becoming the Wave
Synchronicities Point the Way
Earlier this week a friend was telling me how she has been walking along the beach for weeks watching the waves and how they form themselves before rising up and rolling onto the shore. She is a photographer and explained that she wants to capture that precise moment when the wave begins to gather itself into a swell, just before it crests; the birth of the wave. I was intrigued by the precision of her description of this particular moment in the quick, cyclical life of an ocean wave.
I have a cousin, also a brilliant photographer, who spent some time with an incredibly high definition camera capturing still images of waves at different points in their trajectory. Then he would blow these images up to gigantic proportion's – 4' x 6' – so that you could really appreciate each of those dynamic interfaces between the self-organizing form we call a wave and its physical manifestation among drops of H2O.
An artist friend of mine back in Chicago, Louise LeBourgeois has spent her entire professional career painting waterscapes of Lake Michigan. (See image below.) Each one summing up a different mood of the calm or restless waters.
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Before going to bed last night I was on Facebook and was startled to see the animated GIF that appears at the top of this post. It was very clearly in the same genre as what the previous three individuals that I've mentioned we're trying to do; that is to capture that special moment of the birth of a wave.
Then, as a final synchronistic gesture, this passage in the book I was reading before falling asleep burst upon my consciousness:
The Hopi universe has two basic aspects: that which is manifest and thus more ‘objective’ and that which is beginning to manifest and is more ‘subjective’. Concrete objects are manifest and in this way already belong to the past; inner images, representations, expectations and feelings are ‘subjective’, on their way to manifestation, and thus bend more towards the future. The present is that razor’s-edge where something stops beginning to manifest (is already past) or is on the verge of beginning to manifest. There is no continuing flow of time for the Hopi, but a multiplicity of subtly distinguished events.
The Razor’s Edge Where Imagination Becomes Reality
This passage had the effect of jerking me wide-awake. I sat up in bed and reread the paragraph and realized that the paintings and photographs of waves were pushing towards this same idea: that point where the wave begins to swell up is that razor’s-edge, the point between something being imagined and something spilling into objective manifestation. The ocean – married to the moon and the wind and gravity - creates the possibility of waves and causes them to form. The wave is like the outer expression of the ocean imagining, dreaming, thinking.
The book I was reading is called Time: Rhythm and Repose it was written by Marie Louise von Franz. She was drawing her ideas from the great German linguist, Benjamin Whorf, who (back in the 1930s and 40s) was fascinated by the Hopi language and the fact that they did not have verb tenses the way that European languages do. Instead, they described events as coming into being; as being sudden or unexpected, or as being repetitive or continuing; thus expressing a different way of describing the passage of time.
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These ruminations caused me to go back in my own memory and recall a very significant reverie I had in which I experienced my own version of exploring what we, in our own linguistic metaphor, often referred to as "the arrow of time."
In this reverie I suddenly found myself riding the tip of an arrow or spear as if I were the figurehead on the prow of a ship. I was moving with incredible, unimaginable speed through space, and I realized that the point of this spear was the creative point where the unmanifest was coming into manifestation. The extraordinary exhilaration of being at the front edge of the unfoldment of being was such a rush, that it startled me out of my reverie. But I have never forgotten that sense being present at "the creation of the world."
Curiously, in a conversation with my younger son later that week, as I was trying to describe this experience he jumped in with excitement to say that he’d experienced the exact same feeling earlier that day when he was in what he called his ‘creative zone.’ His feeling was that of having no impediments or roadblocks to the creative rush; the sense of moving at full throttle through the atmosphere of mind. It had the same feeling of exhilaration that I was describing.
Common to both of our experiences was the idea that using the language of "time unfolding, or time flowing, is much too gentle; – "becoming" hurls itself into beingness with breathtaking ferocity! It rides the spear point of Zeus's thunderbolt! It breaks the speed of light! It is the great ocean expressing its vast beingness in a single drop that emerges into light propelled by the law of waves!
The most enduring and important insight of this “riding the wave” experience was the deep sense of having been truly and fully alive – being neither in the remembering past nor the hopeful future, but in the immediacy of the present, I knew myself to be alive, to be unique, and to be joined to the great surge of Life itself.
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As I mused more deeply on these ideas it occurred to me that one of the residual effects of seeing time and space and matter in this new formulation is that it turns all objects into "the past." - Concrete objects are manifest and in this way already belong to the past; as Marie Louise Von Franz put it. In a very real sense, everything that's already been created is already ‘not becoming’ and is therefore in a state of decay.
This is one more reason to listen carefully to those new professionals in the business of clutter-busting, who have recognized that holding onto stuff slows us down and makes us feel encumbered. It is not just that stuff takes up space, it is that stuff lives in the past, it takes up time. If we are to be free to lean into the future, or as the Hopi Indians would say, to be in the place of becoming; to be continually coming into manifestation, we can't live with the objects of the past. They have to be let go so that we can travel lightly in the present.
For myself, I choose to ride the thunderbolt rather than sit amidst the ruins of what has been.
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And of what value are these meditations on time and objects and Self? Well, they go to the very heart of the deep existential problems that we have as human beings on this planet whirling through space… and time: Who am I? Why am I here? What’s it all about?
Perhaps no one has said it better, or with more brevity, then the great American poet, Walt Whitman:
Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here—that life exists and a Self - that the powerful play goes on - and you may contribute a verse!
“Bright Nocturne” Louise le Bourgeois
