Slipping Whole-Bodied into An Unbroken Trance

Dear Friends and Family,

If you’re reading from North America, chances are you’re in the midst of significant winter weather. Wherever you are in the world today, may you be safe and warm. I’m glad you’re here.

Many of you know from Substack Notes that I migrated to higher ground away from the French Broad River on Tuesday just as the waters breached the banks. Today’s reflections were penned before the rains came when all was still dreamy down there. Today, it’s a drying puddle of river-bottom mud. I marvel at how soon the Earth soaks up a river’s heavy sigh.

Last week, I announced an upcoming course, Awaken Wonder. I’m thrilled to share that, as of this writing, the course is nearly half full and will likely meet as two cohorts instead of one so that we may come together as intimate circles.

What’s more, a generous donor came forth on Tuesday to offer several scholarships to interested participants who may benefit from tuition support.

I find this all rather extraordinary and a collective whisper in praise of wonder. To you who have registered already, thank you. A marvelous exploration awaits us.

I’ve attached the course announcement at the bottom of today’s reflections. Registration is open until the course fills or January 21. If something inside you quickens at the thought of exploring wonder, I hope you will join us.

Please email me with any questions you may have and to register. If you would like to be considered for a scholarship, please let me know in your email: reneeeliphd@gmail.com.

Ever in gratitude and with love,

Renée

This day not yet dawned, I lie in bed and wait. Nearby and soon, a bird will blossom into song, then another and another after to join them, until this newly lighted swath of Earth spinning circles with a universe of stars opens into a symphony. I have often lain quiet wondering what impulse arouses this cardinal, that gold finch, and there, the mourning dove to breathe lilting melody into the air; the air an atmosphere, an endless unseeable that soon will carry them from their place of night slumber to a next and next tree limb.¹

These waking songs are not cries of defense in the face of apparent danger. They are not yelps for food. They do not foreshadow a change in weather. They are dancing orations into the morning air, an unmarred innocence, unbridled eagerness, unmuted bliss. In these waking moments, I sense in the birds gathered here a seeming desire to express, simply to express, the fleeting feelings of being.

At dawn, but not only at dawn, at other times, too, when one is touched perchance with wonder, it is without attempt the slip whole-bodied into dreamy diaphaneity. Such slip comes when rhythms of night and day expectedly give way one to the other yet take us by surprise; when the heavenly dome of speckled light shimmering in onyx sky seems so close at hand, it is eyes’ radiance itself; when the whisper of wind with sparrow song emanate with such immediacy, it is as if they issue forth from inside one’s own ears. 

These moments carry within them—precious few as they may seem to be—a quality of being not an island outside of and observing waves of Reality swelling toward and vanishing from one’s watch. These moments usher in a quality of being the Whole of Reality itself. Here, self and world are not separate but the unity of “all that transluces both.”²

It has been uttered through the ages that the experience of wonder is the birth of human reflection, reflection given over perhaps by immensity of feeling. And so, by wonder, I do not mean a sudden itch of curiosity for some fact graspable though not yet apprehended. I do not mean a taste of bewilderment hungering for an explanation, which might quiet momentarily the pang of not knowing. By wonder, I mean slipping whole-bodied into an unbroken trance with what is as it is—this is an altogether unyielding mystery about which no mere fact can imaginably suffice.³  This is dancing into awareness seems suddenly so wholly suffused with desire for our presence to it that it in turn solicits our yen not so much to understand what it is as to be entranced with that it is.

Perhaps it is so then that the experience of wonder is the ever-present touch of life by Life, aliveness suddenly enlivened by the ground of and intertwining all. In these moments, we find ourselves thrown and shaken, if briefly, from what we believe to be known. Like a poet sitting in wait for words slippery and shy to meander toward and gather just long enough to reveal what is beyond them, we have only to become still before these flickering bids for our waking wonder and allow them to seize our existence and disclose for a moment the plenitude of being.  

Such are the days here by the river, imbued with wonder in the rhythms of dawn and dusk and little more, rhythms expected and yet every one unlike any other. Yesterday, I looked up and out the window and to my surprise, a sudden sweep of silver shimmered across the late-day tin sheen of water. A schoal of fishes was bursting bubbles across the surface, the now silver shimmer dancing like wind. Only, this wind you could see because it was water. I lost my place on the page, and that was that, and it mattered not because why did I look up in just that moment if not for some communion between the fishes and me calling one another into the seenness of being? Can you imagine any other reason? 

We are never one without Other, never an enclosed unit, and so never without inner fleshy awareness that we need . . . the light of a new day, the air that carries a song, the beauty of a breath and grandeur of every living Other and It all. Could we say that wonder is a burst of feeling? And if we take this inquiry another step, might we say a burst of feeling is the recognition of this most basic fact of life—that need is and there’s a certain uncertainty between need and its fulfillment?⁴ Here, the fear that fulfillment won’t be so. There, the tremulous whisper of wordless utterance when it is.⁵

Marvelous is the sun, that it rises again! 
Praise be the fact that I wake to another day!
Glory is the goodness in this next breath!

To utter and to word is to share in the expressiveness of the wonder of being.  

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1. German philosopher and biologist, Andreas Weber, offers a poignant reflection on the “carrying capacity of air” in a chapter titled thus. Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology, trans. Rory Bradley (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2014).

2. Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, trans. Noel Barstad and Algis Mickunas (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1985). p. 7.

3. Peter Kingsley, A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tibet and the Destiny of the Western World (Point Reyes, CA: Golden Sufi Center, 2018). Phrase “unbroken trance,” p. 26.

4. Twentieth century German philosopher, Hans Jonas elaborates on this idea in The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966/2001).

5. Theologian, philosopher, and comparative religionist, Rudolf Otto put forth the idea of the mysterium tremendum as the sudden experience of awe and fear, a tremulousness, in the face of the wondrous, the mysterious, giving way to the ‘birth’ in the human of the experience of God. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and It’s Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1923/1952).