Ode to More Joy

And becoming more like a Hummingbird

Before I sign off for a two month summer pause and a fall rebrand, an unexpected poem announced itself while I was watching the full Moon rising on my beautiful balcony. My mind was a mess after a particularly terrible Tuesday in the ever present news cycle. And it made me realize that I was not just ‘watching news’ but taking them on emotionally. This is hubris; nobody cares in Gaza or LA what I, an old writer in Canada, thinks. My readers might care, but if I don’t sally forth with opinion pieces, they won’t suffer.

What I realized is that I was paying attention using mostly my Left Brain faculties obsessed with Control. I have none. And it was driving me to despair.

Attention, as Ian McGilchrist keeps reminding us, is a deeply meaningful, even sacred act, one that determines how you think about everything. In the West, we’re all paying attention with the Left Brain which is good at sorting, labeling, ordering, being obsessed with Control and above all, being perennially correct. The Right Brain where spirituality, joy and creativity lives, has been sidelined though signs that it is making a comeback are everywhere. Several articles have tackled this phenom and one of the more interesting is Classical Liberalism Without The Strong Gods, by Adam Partridge. He describes a growing phenomenon that sees a host of famous people like JP, Aiaan Hirsi Ali and Peter Thiel, among others, returning to the comforts of the Catholic Church. He argues that this is a serious mistake because Strong Gods always lead to dogma and authoritarianism. The article fails to satisfy me because it basically says we should just give our old school liberalism rooted in openness, atheism, ethics, science and strong social frameworks another try. He fails to see that in his way, he is advocating for a regression to something that has failed, just as much as the new true believers in Christianity are doing. Neither path opens the way forward; both look back. And we urgently need to discover something different that we haven’t tried and failed at.

Fortunately, there are other ways to revere the divine than the old Abrahamic religions. The weakness of The Strong Gods piece lies in ignoring the other historic paths open to us. One of them is the Romantic movement in Germany that arose as a direct result of the Enlightenment challenge to religious beliefs. The German Romantics, particularly Schelling, took on our current predicament of wishing to retain rationality as it exists in science and evolutionary theory while at the same time embracing a spiritual foundation that is rooted in Christian ideals of love and a loving personal God but that goes far beyond what the Church teaches. Even Goethe became a kind of mystical Christian and we may find it instructive to read the German Romantics again because we live in similarly chaotic times.

Remember, the Romantics arose during the Napoleonic Wars and a fundamental shift away from the old aristocratic order. The church fathers also found themselves under attack, see the earlier period of Luther’s Reformation. The Enlightenment in France triggered the Germans to an intellectual revolt against Descartes’ dictum I think therefore I am. Their dictum might have been I feel therefore I am. Which sounds very modern to my ears. We too are desperate to shed the excesses of the Enlightenment, its Left Brain dominance that has delivered a soulless technocratic world we are unable to control. Our communication technologies have ‘rendered us ungovernable’, says Sam Harris in conversation with Jordan Peterson, because we can no longer agree on any common story to unite us, ‘we have shattered the information landscape’. I think it’s worse than that; we have managed to shatter our spiritual landscape as well.

But never fear. We have more at our disposal than either the Christian church or Atheism. That’s a false dichotomy. I’m talking about a worldview that goes back as far as Plato and if someone like Ian McGilchrist takes it seriously, who am I to think I know better? McGilchrist calls himself a Panentheist, not to be confused with Pantheist. This is not a simple idea and takes many forms, but it appeals to me because it describes a dynamic relationship between humanity and God without the burdens of dogma or an organized church. I have just begun to seriously consider this path, which is not a short term endeavour. I expect to be on it for some time, maybe forever. Thank you, Dr McGilchrist. He is, by the way, unapologetic about our deep-seated need to connect with the Sacred though he doesn’t claim that the only path to a spiritual life is through the church, or even Christianity.

He would certainly disagree with the Strong Gods article that wants us to believe atheist Denmark is a good model for a liberal yet cohesive state held together not by shared sacred values but strong local institutions. But I wonder: is the essay not missing something? Because it seems to me the Danes, an old Christian culture, still carry within them the values of a Christian heritage that informs their society at every level even if nobody goes to church on Sundays. I can’t see how this model will work in a society as young, fractured, and lost as ours. We need the Sacred; but likely without all the trimmings of an organized religion and reams of dogmatic texts. This is an enormous challenge: to fashion something truly new out of the ashes of a society in peril. I believe we can do it as long as we allow both sides of our brains to play in tandem. We have to reintegrate the Right Brain into our daily lives and especially, our institutions, sclerotic with bureaucracy and shot through with corruption. It will take a great deal of internal and external work, but it is possible and necessary for our very survival as a society, as a culture, as a free people. One of the positive things that this revolution is already delivering is a recognition that maybe we haven’t been as free as we imagined until recently. I think there is hope because we’re in the process of identifying and naming what the actual problems are. It is a start.

While I’m on ‘sabbatical summer’, I’m going to delve more deeply into the Panentheistic/mystical approach and report back in September.

This is a much longer prelude than originally planned to the simple poem that emerged from my balcony vigil.

I wish all my readers a joyful, peaceful summer, wherever you are and in spite of whatever else might be happening in our chaotic world.

ON BEING A HUMMINGBIRD

Does it see me as a giant flower, I wonder, as it hovers just a foot away sharing its hummingbird world for a few seconds of wonder

Maybe it can hear my mind humming/replaying violence on the streets and ten dead children in Austria/the world is too much with me/even as the full Scorpio Moon rises/casting a brilliant pitiless light on me and the hovering humming creature

Scorpio has delivered its sting/and there is more to come/there is always more/message received/ this is a dreadful world Master Jack/I want my illusions back

We have a problem Houston/it’s widely known and understood/but nobody wants to look deeper/under the hood/while at the back I always hear the hum of distant drums

getting closer/the drums are insisting I listen/I don’t know what it means/I do know the centre is fraying/the people are rioting/while yellow flowers bloom and burst out of my big pot and the hummingbird wants to tell me something/before it darts off/finding another sweet spot

I could change my mind/stop obsessing about great clashing powers/and return to the flowers/ to sweet sanity

I can be a hummingbird in pursuit of the Nectar of Life/while I still can/ I could try it and be grateful/ that I am/ human/able to relate to other creatures/even the elusive hummingbird/ who knows how sweet Life is if only you hover and dart like an alien spaceship/ come secretly to earth to spy on us/ and perhaps/report back to the Gods/that we are in trouble again/which is after all/normal