Woke up this morning feeling dissatisfied with myself, so I started to pray—to freshness, my friend. But as I said, or thought, words, I wondered how to visualize the presence of freshness in that moment. Was it an invisible and imaginary construct like Harvey the rabbit, a glowing finger writing messages on the wall of my mind, a ghostly apparition, a vivid and convincing memory, a coordinated set of incidents from which presence could be inferred, a negescence or presence of absence?
I’ve speculated elsewhere, plausibly I hope, that freshness is present to us and we to freshness in a shared livingness field, such that the presence and motions of each livingness in the field are perceptible to all others, as conductors in an electric field modify it by their presence and movements in ways that can affect other conductors nearby and at a distance. [Freshness as agent in the field, and the transcendent the field itself, and freshness the creator of the transcendent.]
For two reasons, I can’t pray to freshness as to something or someone sitting semi-transparent and cross-legged in the chair across the room: I can’t imagine such a thing convincingly, and anything able to sit on a chair isn’t appropriate to freshness in its scope and scale.
I have to rely on analogy to imagine, and wait for experience to convince. But a compelling analogical image can help me begin to communicate freely and fully with freshness, and freshness with me.
The analogy that seems best is to think of freshness as the great sea, and I as a watershed (not just a stream) on land, one of many nourished by water distilled from the one sea as rain, and draining eventually into the sea again.
To explore the analogy further, the watershed, whether a ridge-bound wetland or a whole river basin, encounters the sea in at least three ways direct and indirect: in its interior as rain, at its mouth as tide or current, and as destination giving it orientation, as well as elevation, giving it force of flow.
Likewise watersheds encounter each other directly at their boundaries where they meet, and at their confluences where they merge, and indirectly through geological events within or between them which have upstream and downstream impact. Here the analogy breaks down because whereas watersheds are immobile, I and other others come and go and move around.
So does it help my praying to direct it to freshness as a sea-like presence (such as I walked next to yesterday along Dorchester Shores), or to think of myself as a watershed-like being (such as a river with its implied tributaries) and to look forward to encountering others who are like me sea-encountering drainage areas in their own right?
But one thing strikes me as important: such prayers will only be worth making if freshness welcomes me, likes me, finds me interesting, that is, has a stance of solidarity with me [as opposed to a stance of hostility–rejecting, disliking and ignoring] and that I can only know by actually encountering.
Can I wrap my mind (and heart) around the idea of the sea ‘loving’ each watershed of the land (ignoring deserts as special cases in or exceptions to the analogy) and of each watershed ‘loving’ the sea? Sitting on the side of my bed in the morning, can I see myself ready to receive rain and ready to deliver it back? I know the look of vast waters and massive clouds, of sea and skyscapes. Can I appreciate you, freshness, better if I visualize you as such? Let’s try.
Here then are the steps of encountering: first, recognizing, acknowledging, and addressing the other as you; second, taking a stance of solidarity; third, speaking and listening, acting and responding impulsively, that is, spontaneously.
We might take issue with that last step. Won’t impulsive action make us reckless, unreliable, ruthless, or at least disorderly? But freshness, always acting in frexhos mode–friendship, hospitality and exploration, teaches us to perform reckfully, to maintain reliably and to achieve ruthfully (though not necessarily without some disorder), not as a matter of prescriptions and rules, but through transcendent ‘coaching’ by our friend, freshness.