I woke this morning in dread. Politics, the environment, whatever: my heart was heavy with dire foreboding and preemptive grief. What more can I do, I asked myself. Where is encouragement, much less hope? What can relieve this gnawing anguish?
This week, Puccini operas. So, Manon dying in the desert crying “Alone, lost, abandoned,” or Cavaradossi moments before his execution singing “I never loved life more,” or Minnie to the weeping crowd of miners who loved her, “Goodbye, beloved country.” And these feelings are familiar to me and frequent these days.
On this site WorthWanting (and in my life), I express faith in encounters and encountering, that they each are of true and lasting value, enduring even when people do their worst or the worst happens, and outliving this mortal life of mine, and that of the nation and nature.
So why am I not comforted? Why does this conviction not console, at least calm my agitation. When I’m on my deathbed, close to the drop-off of the conveyor of time, will the knowledge that the encounters of a lifetime carry on in the transcendent world give me the affirmation that will make my passing peaceful?
Any world-view worth wanting has to work here, or it doesn’t pass muster at all, no matter what its pedigree or popularity.
So I sat down to see if I could think it through. Page after page of printer paper I covered with the scratchings of my calligraphy pen. By the fifteenth, I began to get hold of something that began to open up into something I found satisfying.
I speak often in the pages of this website about freshness, the breeze from beyond, literally from the trans-mundane (not supernatural) world, ever inviting us to encounter, then ever engaging actively in encounters, making them into the occasions of lasting value they are.
Freshness: an active, potent presence whenever I (or any) open or are open to the potentiality, energy or power of any other.
Freshness: manifest as that sense of on-and-on-ness, as the glamour things take on of majesty, mystery or camaraderie, as the appearance of the unprecedented and unpredictable, and as common cause made with the livingness of others.
Freshness: providing the compelling point of whatever is worth doing, worth wanting.
Teleonomic or teleologic as it may be, freshness’s ‘project’ consists of ‘uploading’ into the transcendent world as much of the mundane world as it can, encounter by encounter. If we think of encounters as engendering occasions, that is, as occasions when potential is realized, not just as finished fact, but as fresh future, then the transcendent is progressively being filled with an plenitude of multifarious occasions, each ever going forward.
The abundance of encounters all over the world that can and do occur (and have occurred in history) all the time; the multiplicity of different encounters we ourselves can and do participate in; the many, varied realizations of our unique potentiality, energy and power expressed in each of these encounters: this is what the transcendent world is being ‘stocked’ with, richness upon richness, all for–who knows what end, if any. Given the way freshness is and acts, I have high hopes though.
Activity calms my insurgent terror. Postcards, phonebanks, banners and posters give me a sense of traction on a world that feels like its skidding down a steep mountain road full of blind corners.
Daily exercise helps. Opera and books help. But the conviction that the unceasing activity of freshness is producing something big and lasting (whatever it may be) in the transcendent, and that I and all of us, and the free-range livingnesses of each of us over the course of our lives, are and will be an essential and sought-after constituents of that grandeur, and that whatever happens in the mundane won’t mess it up, puts the exigencies of our mundane existence into broader perspective.
I spoke yesterday on one of my phonebanking calls with a widower a few years my senior. He had lots of stories to tell, and after I gave my vote by mail pitch, I just listened and learned. Topics: dialysis, driving, eye surgery, courtship, childhood, caregiving.
I felt my heart swelling then, as it is now in reflection, as I sank into the encounter. Freshness pervaded the occasion. So much of his life story had resonance with mine.
I had to go, so we stopped with a cordial Thanks and Goodbye. And I thought then, and now, that that conversation was a keeper, and it’s actually being kept, along with all other such encounters, mine, yours, ours.
Out of ingredients like these, what a cake may be being baked!