Go to the river to find the nuggets; follow the nuggets to the lode.
I have to recognize that, though I can’t fully explain why, this path, maybe two miles long running right next to the Neponset River (a tranquil companion never more than three or so meters to the side) is so evocative for me.
After I discovered it in early April and walked it the first time, I kept thinking about it, its specific details and its general impact on me. I just traveled it a second time a few days ago, and the effect is just as strong.
Is this little trail a concrete expression of fantasy landscapes I fed my imagination on as a boy? I’ve tried to tell other people about the power it, so isolated and yet not so far away, has on me, and the best I can do after all my glowing descriptions is to say, Let me take you and show you. This is something of an act of some courage because maybe whoever agrees to go will be disappointed and I’ll be tasked to justify my joy: Okay, there’s poison ivy here and there, but not much, and if we keep our eyes open… But see how smoothly, like a soft blouse, the path matches the curves of the river…
If I want to share what it’s like to me these days, I’d include a reference to my friend, that trail beside the Neponset, and how it lures me on and on; and how it makes me think about design (yes, design, for it runs along the top of a berm between the river and a series of wetlands and pools); and how the Neponset (a river I’ve recently come to admire) flows so evenly and broadly and intently from way out near Hopkinton (where another famous river as well as a marathon have their start) to the harbor just opposite Squantum; and how the tender little tableaux along the way touch my heart with their evocative perfection; and how I would like to take a kayak up as far as I could; and how I want to have this wild, somewhat lonely place, as a secret and yet a shared secret. In short, this trail as I have encountered it, once, twice so far, is a multi-faceted gift of livingness.
As I wrap up my first year of “Worth Wanting: the ‘freshness deep down things’”, which I’ve largely spent exploring the interrelated notions of freshness, livingness, encountering, others and othernesses, and the transcendent, it’s time to pivot to the practical. So here I introduce a new form of conversation which I’ll call golding, short for gifts-of-livingness discovering.
If we think of livingness as our appetite for encountering, gifts of livingness are whatever it is that whets that appetite for engagement with others and othernesses. If we think of encounters as adventures of livingness, gifts of livingness are the riches found in the encounters themselves; as well as the intimations of even more to be had in the mother lodes of potential encounterables not just mundane, but even transcendent, and so unconstrained by time, space and number; and ultimately for freshness itself, palpably present in all encounters and so conferring its everlastingness on each.
A golding conversation, then, is one in which we swap news of what is currently stirring in us and what adventures of livingness we have been having so as to quicken our mutual appetite for encounters. So we consider questions like:
*What horizons are luring our imaginations?
*What keeps on winning our respect or admiration?
*What keeps on arousing our curiosity or wonder?
*What keeps on touching our hearts?
*What new arrivals or developments are challenging the patterns of our life?
Golding is not confessional or interrogative. It doesn’t solve or correct anything. There’s no arguing or justifying. It’s not about incentives or compulsions. Golding is not a performance, but a report, descriptively, reflectively, on the liveliness of our livingness.
So a walk along a river can be an example of what’s up with my livingness these days, as a certain book might be, or a visit with grandchildren, or a ten-minute play presented on zoom as part of a theater marathon, or any of the many encounters I, or any, have or can have with any of many others and othernesses in our vicinity, and that’s the point of golding: bringing all this news to the table for mutual enrichment.
So I’m making a plan for meeting people who are ready to go golding together, and see if this new, or at least newly named, form of conversation works. Does it help us say or show what other forms of conversation have not allowed or encouraged? Does it stimulate our appetite for encountering? Does it whet that further appetite for the realm of pure encounterability, for transcendent freshness itself? Let’s see.