As Kingfishers Catch Fire
In this piece for Unpsychology Magazine, Susan Holliday draws on ecological principles to explore the practice of ‘mattering’
The girl is lost. Wandering through faceless corridors, she feels helpless and pathetic. All around her people are busy, engaged in their own activity. Somewhere in her navigational system she knows she’s meant to do something, to be somewhere. But what and where? Surely she should know (everyone else seems to). But there are no signs, no maps, no breadcrumbs to guide her through this bewildered state. She feels increasingly frantic. Something is very wrong here. And time is running out.
I have dreamed this dream in a hundred different iterations for a decade or more. It haunts me in the early hours, unsettling my heart and disturbing my sleep. Over the years I have made an uneasy peace with it. Drawing on my training as a psychotherapist, I’ve framed it as a trace of early childhood wounding. I was born in La Paz, the sprawling capital city of Bolivia, where my father was a diplomat. Both he and my mother were busy people. My infant needs would undoubtedly have been inconvenient, a distraction from the well-trodden protocols of diplomatic life.
Tethered in this understanding, I have learned to live with the dream’s nightly visitations, like something trapped beneath the floorboards of my life, stuck somewhere I can’t access. Until now. Because recently the dream has been visiting me more often. With ever greater urgency, the dreamer cries out ‘something is very wrong here.’ Her message simply doesn’t make sense to me. My life has rarely been more settled, more fruitful, more blessed. I’m engaged in meaningful collaborations in my professional life and a fresh burst of creativity has reignited my writing. And yet the insistence of these dawn intrusions is palpable - and rising.
So one day, after a particularly disturbed night, I turn the dream upside down. Instead of identifying with the lost girl, I take the viewpoint of the busy passers-by. Wrapped in the veil of their preoccupation, I feel uneasy in a different way. I begin to feel numb and disconnected. Before this stupor has time to cast its spell on me, I turn towards the lost girl. ‘Are you alright? You Seem lost’ I say. ‘Can I help you?’ It is immediately clear that she is very much not alright. She is fading fast into a kind of oblivion.
* * *
Helplessness. We don’t talk about it much do we? Or if we do, we are quick to offer advice that will restore our sense of agency and influence. We can speak to someone right? Ring the call centre, post on social media, write to our MP, join the march. But the truth is that these actions which bring us temporary relief don’t always seem to change the direction of travel. So then what do we do with our helplessness?
It takes a few days before I realise what a radical act it might be - to turn towards helplessness. It’s as though this simple act of engagement – ‘can I help you?’ - has switched a light on in my awareness, exposing a dimension of my present which has been systematically overlooked. It turns out there are threads of helplessness strewn all over my life. I begin to notice how often I get lost in the maze of digital process which plagues modern life; how feeble I feel each time I visit the supermarket and fail to counter the battalions of plastic which brazenly make their way into my trolley; how insignificant I feel in a world where value is calibrated according to ‘likes’ on social media.
It dawns on me that not all helplessness is the same. There is existential helplessness, the kind I feel when I realise I cannot stem the tides of ageing which are gradually dismantling my mother’s life, or protect my children entirely from disappointment and pain. Then there is helplessness born of circumstance – poverty, inequality, discrimination, and the abuse of power, not to mention the inexorable mechanising and fragmenting of human interaction.
What interests me particularly in relation to the dream is a third kind - helplessness arising out of my nature, the kind I feel when I have to tackle an IT glitch or decipher a complicated spreadsheet. My perception is naturally ‘wired’ for image and pattern, not for abstraction and sequence. This last kind of helplessness is often met by ripples of shame. Faced with rows of numbers I feel lost like the girl in my dream, ineffectual, weak. This weakness seems to point to a deficiency in me. Surely I should be able to handle all this (everyone else seems to). Surely I’m not actually helpless?
Steeling (stealing) myself from this humiliation, I feel an overwhelming urge to push through my limitation and reimpose some measure of control. Someone is to blame for making this all so hard for me. It’s the system that is ‘stupid’ (or the person I am dealing with) - not me. This surge of blame feels sweet. Aggression floods my nervous system. The helpless feelings abate and power flows back into my veins. Such a reliable friend, blame, always on hand and quick to respond to the merest whiff of shame. With blame comes blessed relief. No wonder I’m struggling here. It’s all someone else’s fault. Apparently.
Something is indeed very wrong here. All I have succeeded in doing through these defensive manoeuvres is to mask my helplessness with aggression. Once the surge of blame subsides, the helplessness returns. It occurs to me then, that perhaps the most powerful thing I can do when confronted by my limitations, is to inhibit my reactions of shame and blame long enough to begin to ask - what on earth is going on here?
So this is what I begin to do. I turn towards my helplessness. I stay with it. And I listen. And this is when the penny begins to drop for me. I begin to realise that my sense of inadequacy in the face of current life challenges, arises at least in part from hidden injunctions to be someone other than I am. Desperate times like these call for activists and influencers, campaigners, protestors and crusaders. Surely I should be one of these? Surely to be a creative introvert right now is to be helpless and irrelevant?
Gradually a new understanding forms in my heart. And this is what it says to me:
It is not within your gift to cover all the bases. You have your part to play. You have your actions to take. These actions are seeded in the deep soil of your incomparable being. They belong to you alone. Search for the character and impulse of your original nature and you will find your action. Let others do the same. And all will be well.
* * *
A few days after this insight dawns on me, I stumble on a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a key it seems, to the riddled wisdom of my helplessness:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.[i]
Apart from the ravishing beauty of Hopkins’ imagery, the most remarkable thing about this poem for me is his coining of ‘selves’ as a verb. By making the noun ‘self’ into an action word, Hopkins seems to suggest that each and every being in the universe is designed not merely to be a ‘self’, but more essentially, to do this being. To enact this core identity[ii].
Hopkins’ indwelling self (‘that being indoors’) is portrayed as essential and immutable. What excites me is how the poem shows us that this original nature is charaterised by its own impulse. It seeks to ‘fling out broad its name … Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came’. This essential life energy translates into action through encounter with something other than itself. Life, in all its particularity, manifests through catching fire, or drawing flame, by tumbling down the well, by being plucked, or swung. The indwelling self, it seems, cannot manifest except through contact with otherness. Revisioned in this way, identity is essentially dynamic and relational.
The point made so powerfully here is that there is no ‘being’ which does not draw out its own particular ‘doing’. It seems to follow from this that when the expression of our particular impulse is blocked, diverted or lost, we feel lost to ourselves and lost in the grand scheme of things.
Perhaps, I wonder, there is just ‘one thing’ I am meant to be doing. One thing, whatever circumstance or challenge I face. I am meant to be ‘doing my being’. It is not what I am that matters (mother, writer, psychotherapist) but how I manifest in all my doing. What matters is the particular quality and orientation of my particular impulse towards self-expression. How my particular ‘doing’ ties together with other ‘doings’ in the wider ecology of being is really not within my gift to comprehend, any more than it is the gift of the kingfisher to understand how his catching fire corresponds with the stone’s ringing.
* * *
It strikes me that Hopkins, who penned these lines in 1877, articulated principles that lie at the heart of indigenous wisdom and contemporary ecology: the principles of ‘inherent worth’ and ‘interdependence’. There is no hierarchy of value in ecology. The tiniest actions of the most invisible creatures on the planet - fungi, bacteria, insects – are indispensable to the life of the whole. In ‘doing their being’, they matter.
This seminal point is underlined by Arne Naess in this book ‘The Ecology of Wisdom’[iii] in which he draws our attention to the ancient Japanese notion of inochi. Translated most simply as ‘life’, the nuance in Japanese is much more subtle. Inochi expresses the intrinsic value and dynamic character of the distinctive life-force in every being. Each life (each inochi) has independent worth and is also essentially life-giving to the whole. Every life expression matters, both in itself and because of its life-giving property.
So our responsibility, first and foremost, must surely be to trust, cherish and manifest our own particular inochi. American choreographer Martha Graham expresses this idea beautifully:
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.[iv]
Each of us, Graham suggests, ‘translates’ a singular vitality into action. If this ‘quickening’ is blocked, ‘it will be lost’. And there’s that word again - ‘lost’. If my particular life-force, my inochi, is blocked, not only will ‘it’ will be lost - ‘I’ will be lost. The inference here is that I will no longer be the open channel through which life translates its particularity into matter. Perhaps this is what D H Lawrence meant when he wrote ‘we are transmitters of life. And when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us.’[v]
* * *
The message of the dream begins to crystallise. The truth is that it is not in my nature to ‘fling out’ my being far and wide, to speak out on social media, challenge systems and protest against policies. Like the dragonfly, the motions of my being are unlikely to set the world on fire, but they do, I believe, ‘draw flame’. In my therapy practice, I open the wings of my heart to the person before me and draw out the vital and particular beauty of their being. I look into the dark, but the essential impulse of my nature is to draw out the light. My responsibility to this impulse (this ‘urge’) is to see it ‘clearly and directly’ and ‘to keep the channel open’ (which means I must not let my impulse become clouded by trying to express something which is not mine).
It is not my place to consider how valuable my ‘selving’ is nor ‘how it compares with other expressions’. It is what I have been given and it is the part I can play in the life of the whole. Seeing this clearly, I no longer feel quite so lost, so helpless and irrelevant. I begin to matter. For beauty must count for something, surely? In ways I can only intuit, beauty seems vital to me. Life-giving medicine, transforming fire. Borrowing from Hopkins, I wonder if we might even begin to speak of the verb ‘to beauty’ as the action through which light pours into the world. Perhaps this is the value of beauty in the grand scheme of things. Beauty radiates. Beauty illuminates. In a world ravaged by the darkness of war and the ugliness of greed, ‘to beauty’ has perhaps never been more urgent or important. This ‘selving’ of beauty - in people, in nature, in art - matters.
It occurs to me now that a great portion of my sense of helplessness and insignificance comes from trying to ‘do’ someone else’s ‘being’. Hopkins’ poem changes this for me. We don’t expect the stone to ‘catch fire’ as it wings past us, we delight in the quiet way it glistens under the rippling current of a freshwater stream. We don’t expect the salmon to roar, or the rose to howl. The salmon and the rose are precious to us just as they are, just doing their being. Without them we might never know the incomparable beauty of their blush. Somewhere in the intricate web of life they are precious in themselves and to each other too.
The resolution of my helplessness, I realise, does not lie in heroically taking on the enormity of the world’s challenges, nor in trying to cover all the bases. It lies in ringing true to myself - in selving. The path that Hopkins and Graham set out is not without challenge. ‘Doing my being’, requires that I let go of all the other expressions I might wish for, actions which might seem more impressive or powerful. It means leaning towards a radical acceptance of the limits to my nature. My helplessness guides me towards these edges of limitation. Seen clearly and without shame, these limitations point to the many areas of my life where it’s okay to ask for help. This acceptance of limitation does not signify weakness or uselessness. It is a consequence of the perfect distinction of ‘each mortal thing’ and the unique place it occupies in the life of the whole.
And this brings me back to the dreams and the question which set me off on this path of inquiry: Why now? Why are these images of helplessness and insignificance visiting me in my sleep at precisely the stage of my life when at last I feel some sense of mastery? A clue lies perhaps in James Hollis’ writing about the disturbance which often accompanies the transition through mid-life. Hollis suggests that the necessary goal of this ‘middle passage’ is ‘the restoration of the person to a humble but dignified relationship to the universe’[vi]. This restoration seems to demand from us a painful confrontation with limitation and the disillusionment of the heroic ideal which underpins our ‘first adulthood’.
The impulse to conquer (to overcome limitation) is a necessary one in the first half of life. It propels us out of our infant helplessness towards agency and self-responsibility. But, Hollis suggests, there is a ‘second adulthood’ in which we are called to turn from conquest towards interdependence. This transition to maturity rests in a new synthesis between the gifts of our distinction and the reality of our limitations.
We are still far from understanding limitation as the defining edge of being which brings us into our authentic particularity and guides us towards taking our place in the grand scheme of things. In a society which hails confidence and the ability to dominate as the hallmarks of success, there is little space for limitation. The conquering stance casts a long shadow. Shrouded in hubris, our encounters with limitation provoke shame. And shame, as I have been discovering, is where the trouble really starts. Because shame spawns blame. And blame begets violence.
The troubles of our present world seem so very painful right now - an all too real nightmare. Something is very wrong here. And time is running out. Could it be that the epidemic of violence and brute force which is so distressingly evident is a defence against the shame of limitation? It seems we are caught in a terrible cleft between the ideal of limitless power and the threat of abject helplessness. Perhaps it is time for us to acknowledge the limits of our human nature, alongside its many gifts, so that we can restore our species to a more humble but dignified relationship to the universe. Perhaps we are encountering an initiation into ‘second adulthood’ at the collective level, a rite of passage which asks that we search for what really matters and what we are each here ‘to matter’ (to enact), as our contribution to the life of the whole.
Bill Plotkin draws out this connection between finding our ‘niche’ and maturing into elderhood:
Elders are people who know why they were born, who know who they are as unique individual participants in the web of life, and who, in most everything they do, creatively occupy their distinctive ecological niche as a life-enhancing gift to their people and to the greater Earth community’.[vii]
Turning towards helplessness, I am discovering my limits. In my limits I am finding the edges of my particularity. In my particularity I am beginning to understand how I matter in the grand scheme of things. Accepting my limitations is teaching me something else of supreme importance. We need each other. Together we make a whole. Together we find our power. Together we can realise a better world. My part, my action is to ‘draw flame’. In words and images, in conversations and in quiet reflection, I draw out the light. This impulse towards beauty is the ‘quickening’ of my soul, my inochi.
For that I came.
* * *
Endnotes
[i] Hopkins, G.M (2015). As Kingfishers Catch Fire. London, Penguin Little Black Classics.
[ii] Hopkins’ understanding of the expression of self is encapsulated in his twin concepts, ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inscape_and_instress.
[iii] Naess, A (2008). The Ecology of Wisdom. Counterpoint
[iv] De Mille, A (1991). Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham–A Biography, Random House.
[v] Lawrence, D H (1994). ‘We are Transmitters’ from his ‘Pansies’ collection of poems 1929, in The Complete Poems of D H Lawrence, Wordsworth Editions.
[vi] Hollis, J (1993). The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife, Inner City Books.
[vii] Plotkin, B (2021). The Journey of Soul Initiation, New World Library.
