Full Contact Living

As a word on the page, mysticism might look exotic or exalted. In lived experience, it is neither. Exotic sounds foreign; exalted feels distant. Mysticism is direct contact with life. More subtraction than addition, it strips away layers of interpretation and abstraction that obscure reality. It touches the heart of the matter. Mysticism is as real as it gets.

It’s hard to write about mysticism because words are a form of interpretation and abstraction several rungs removed from direct contact. Writing is an attempt to convey my experience to you by a series of steps, most of them mental: I have an idea, I pick words to relay my intent, you interpret my words, you form an idea of what I’m saying. We’re engaged in a parallel process of my thoughts alongside your thoughts, hoping for an overlap in understanding. The fewer steps between us, the more chance of connecting with the essence of something.

That is why poetry is so powerful. It relies more on the fullness of language than the logic of language. Done well, poetry conveys by resonance – the ringing of a bell in me, whose vibration rings a bell in you. Poetry uses words, but the impact is more immediate, the depth of the ringing is carried by currents beneath the words. The steps are interrupted, quickened, and our parallel minds are brought closer, perhaps to intersect.

For example, the three paragraphs above do a lot of explaining. But a poem does not explain. It rings the bell and waits to see who responds. Take this poem by Jane Hirshfield:

Lighthouse

Its vision sweeps its one path
like an aged monk raking a garden,
his question long ago answered or moved on.
Far off, night-grazing horses,
breath scented with oatgrass and fennel,
step through it, disappear, step through it, disappear.

The impact of the poem doesn’t arrive through argument, explanation, or logic. The bell may ring for you or not, as happens with poems, but if it does, the experience is direct, not mental. The sound of the bell fades if we overuse our thinking, and comes alive if we open other faculties. Read the poem again, slowly, without expectation, and see what stirs.

For me, I smell the oatgrass, but also the salt air; I feel isolation mingled with companionship; I wonder how far the light reaches into the night; I ask whether my own questions have been answered, or forgotten.

I can analyze a poem, and when I do, I treasure the intellectual insights. But I can also let a poem wash over me, like the sweep of a lighthouse, and something better happens. I enter the poet’s mind, the scene she saw, the nuance she felt. We are sharing the tone of experience, the words are there as gesture.

Or this, written by Kobayashi Issa in the eighteenth century:

Under cherry trees
there are
no strangers

Simple. Elegant. Intimate. By time travel magic, I’ve crossed the centuries to sit with Issa, charmed by the cherry trees, welcomed into a kind of universal friendship. When a poem rings for me, it nudges my usual thinking aside and a fresh and startling presence springs up. This is mysticism. It can be that simple.

Let me pose a challenge, one I will accept myself: that we approach life more as a poem than a problem. Life is not here to be solved, but to be experienced. Yes, there are wicked problems that require our attention, dilemmas large and small that need to be explored and debated. But if we see life as a problem, we grow our problem-solving minds. We neglect the part that hears the poetry.

What does it mean to treat life as a poem? It’s not hard. Only our thinking makes it difficult. Relax your guard; drop the shield your problem-solving has built around you; listen for a tone humming below your normal radar. What we need is not more analysis, but open-hearted presence, tuning ourselves to hear the sound of bells. They are ringing now, patient and hopeful.

Photo by Daniel Gregoire on Unsplash