The Dearest Freshness Deep Down Things
Inspired by a Persian miniature painting, Susan Holliday discovers that poetry is not just a way of writing about the world. It is a way of bringing forth life.
Zal approaches the palace of Rudabeh ~ Persian miniature c.1590
I stand barefoot mid-stream. The waters of a nascent River Derwent skirt around my ankles. Eyes closed, all my awareness is taken up by the shimmering membrane of meeting between woman and water. The notion of there being a ‘subject’ and an ‘environment’ vanishes. What remains is an intimacy that feels palpable and joyous. Perhaps, I muse, this is how it feels to be a rock in a riverbed. An ancient and steadfast fragment of original earth in conversation with a fleeting moment of life in its becoming.[i]
Whether I am standing in the current of a mountain stream, attending to a dream my client is sharing, or delighting in a robin scouting for worms in my garden, I long to encounter what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls ‘the dearest freshness deep down things.’[ii] I’m drawn to the springing of life, to the ‘shimmering membrane’ where life first bubbles up, blinking its inkling eye in the bright world of matter and form.
Experiencing the freshness and vitality of wild water through my senses and my imagination, I feel a deep affinity. The life force that rushes, burbles, ripples, skims, drifts and meanders, is not so very different from my own. Neither is the journey from source to sea. Immersed in this other-wise nature, I remember what our ancestors once knew: we ‘conceive’ ourselves through our affinity with the living world, a vital realm rippling with submerged stories and images which offer us an equivalence to our own unfolding narratives.
I am not suggesting here that ‘nature’ is merely a mirror reflecting human experience (this would be little more than anthropomorphic conceit), but I am convinced that our lives are expressions of a deep interpenetration of vital energies and imaginal forms that ‘lend’ themselves to each other. These affinities are constantly offered up from a subtle realm in which all kinds of interweaving and coalescing forces are forever stirring. We encounter traces of this field of emergence through the language of dreams. But our waking life is no less seeded with revelation, with fresh insight and understanding which longs to be born into our lived experience. Everything, Rilke insists, ‘everything is gestation and then bringing forth’.[iii] We are woven into a poetic ecology.
Conceiving
‘When the soul wants to experience something’, wrote Meister Eckhart, ‘she throws out an image in front of her and steps into it.’[iv] In speaking of ‘soul’ here, I understand him to mean the animating principle of life itself (‘anima mundi’), a submerged wellspring which conceives life. An ‘image’ thrown in front of us could be a moment where we experience something familiar in a new way; a sudden noticing of something in its vital and incomparable particularity; a felt resonance with words (sung, spoken or written); or the trace impression of a dream. Sometimes the thrown image is a work of art which speaks intimately to us.
Often emerging ‘out of the blue’, these imaginal inklings rarely arrive with any great fanfare. Revelation is often a quiet thing. The ‘image’ stands before us like a deer emerging from the forest. Hesitant and tentative, it will not wait long before disappearing back into the trees. Cézanne described this threshold of immanence as a ‘flickering universe, the hesitation of things.’[v]
We conceive ourselves, Eckhart suggests, through noticing the images that soul throws in front of us and then stepping into them. By experiencing the image, we participate in the bringing forth of life in all the multiple possibilities of its essentially dynamic and emergent nature.
Wandering recently through an exhibition of art from the great Mughal empire, at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, I stumble on a little painting from a sixteenth century Persian manuscript, ‘Ferdowsi’s Shah-Nama’ (Book of Kings). In it we see the beautiful princess Rudabeh lowering her raven hair for the young man Zal to climb up. This tender telling of what we might know as the Rapunzel story draws from an earlier epic poem (completed around 1010) which remains central to Iranian culture to this day. Like so many of these early Mughal miniatures, the picture is infused with aliveness. Trees, flowers, water, even the rocks, appear to ripple, shimmer and vibrate. Moved by the freshness and tenderness of the painting I find myself ‘stepping into’ it.
I encounter two figures, a woman reaching down and a man reaching up in an intimate gesture of reciprocity and longing. This life-giving mutuality is mirrored in the stream which pours down from a hidden spring, whilst the trees and flowers face up towards a golden sky. The woman’s long dark hair and the stream tumbling down mirror each other. Both transmit aliveness between different elements of the whole. Both suggest the essential ‘bringing forth’ of life (symbolically, hair often represents this life-giving quality, since each strand is constantly renewed as it grows out). The stream leads us towards the refreshment of an ornamental pond, replete with ducks splashing, delighting in the uninterrupted flow of life coursing through them.
What moves me most in the painting is its sense of freshness. It’s as though everything is springing into life. Lingering a while, it occurs to me that all the living forms depicted here spring from somewhere beyond our line of sight. The stream emerges from a source concealed in the folded mountains. Rudabeh’s hair is fed by tiny crimson rivulets invisible under her skin. The trees and flowers are nourished by underground root systems entwined with infinitely complex mycelial networks.
Nora Bateson describes this originating subterranean source as ‘a realm of potential change, a necessarily obscured zone of wild interactions of unseen, unsaid, unknown flexibility’.[vi] Our own feeling, imagining and desiring draw us towards this kindling realm because this is where experience is at its most vital and refreshing. Somewhere deep beyond our conscious knowing, we trust that this is where we may find our own unique form and experience of aliveness. For we are not bystanders in the ‘flickering universe’, we too are expressions of the essential forthcoming of life. Like rivers, trees, plants and animals, our purpose is to bring forth and transmit the vital singularity of our being-in-the world:
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 time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it.[vii] Martha Graham
What this quickening life longs for is the undivided attention of a heart open to symbolic and allegorical meaning, a mind tuned to the possibility that there is always ‘more than meets the eye’. Children quite naturally see this way. The most unremarkable fragment of experience becomes a keyhole, opening onto an intricately articulated hinterland. We have only to think of the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland or the wardrobe in C. S. Lewis’ Narnia adventures to remember the revelatory powers of this portal vision.
The notion that the living world consists of more than cold hard facts, is not mere child’s play. Einstein himself paid tribute to the existence of other dimensions, seedbeds of unrealised possibility alive beneath the surface of observed life:
Nature shows us only the tail of the lion. But there is no doubt in my mind that the lion belongs with it even if he cannot reveal himself to the eye all at once because of his huge dimension.[viii]
If we are to experience these vital depths, to under-stand life, we need to recognise ‘life’ as a verb (‘life-ing’) and not just as a noun; to experience life in its ‘becoming’ and not just in its ‘being’. Life in its becoming is tender, uncertain and fluid. It shies away from the narrow confines of definitive articulation. What is as yet un-known, un-considered and un-realized cannot be grasped through the solidifying language of preconception. The literal and the abstract kill the inkling stone dead.
Yet we live increasingly in a world dazzled by the cold hard glare of screens and bound by the authority of ‘self-evident’ truths cemented in a vocabulary littered with abstract nouns. Across all the sciences, including psychology, we have largely stripped out the ‘poetic’ understanding which illuminated Einstein’s conceptions, relegating the ‘unseen’ to the world of mere fancy. Attending only to what has already been conceived, perceived and labelled, we overlook the presence of the ‘lion’ and believe that the ‘tail’ is all there is to be seen.
Meanwhile, the living world continues to show us rivers flowing from underground springs, tree roots drawing up nutrients from the soil-swathed underworld, human life conceived in the hidden depths of the womb. Is it really so strange then to believe that our evolving conceptions of ourselves, our thoughts, feelings and intimations, arise from a similarly vital unseen network of implicate coalescing correlations?
Recognising this life-giving subterranean coalescence, Nora Bateson offers us the word ‘aphanipoeisis’ (from Greek aphanis = ‘obscured’, ‘unseen’ and poesis = ‘to make’, ‘bring forth’). Restoring ‘poetry’ to its more dynamic original sense, poiesis (‘to bring forth’), the whole of the living world is essentially poetic. A garden can be ‘poetic’, a meeting, a shared meal, a relationship, and of course a poem. At the same time, none of these are necessarily ‘poetic’ (even the poem!) To establish the poetic credentials of any process, experience or endeavour we might ask: Does it feel vital? Does it render life more vivid? Does it conceive more life? Does it expand or enrich our experience of aliveness? Does it deepen our under-standing of life?
Cultivating an affinity towards the essential poiesis of life matters in science as it does in art. For it is so often the emergent (‘the wanting-to-be-born’), the unspoken and the unforeseen, which bring forth the very qualities, images and energy we need to conceive ourselves afresh as we move forward on our journey towards maturity, as individuals and as a community of beings.
Opening
Following our stream down the folded mountains and into the walled garden, we see its life-giving freshness flow into the ornamental pond and then fall away in a steep drop. Either side the water flows outwards spreading its freshness across the flower-strewn garden. It’s as though the pond represents a life, or a moment in life, which is constantly letting in and letting go.
We tend to imagine the act of perception as an outward movement in which our sight travels to engage with a subject out there, at a distance. In my experience, poetic vision is primarily an act of letting in. To see afresh, to experience life in its becoming, there needs to be an opening in me. Vulnerability is the doorway to conception. Open to all that is not yet known or understood, I become receptive to something vital and unforeseen which cuts through the heart of my preconceptions. Wonder takes root in my seeing.
Many of us are wary of opening to life in its becoming. Perhaps we fear the flow will not come (the river may have dried up or taken a different course), or we worry that too much life might pour in. Receiving life through an opened heart, we risk encountering inconvenient truths, bone-shaking burials and blinding revelations. Like the Greek Cassandra, we may find that it is not so easy to bear the gift of insight in a blind and blinkered world. Perhaps this is why the word ‘wonder’ shares its root with the German Wunde, meaning ‘wound’.
Open to the ever-flowing stream (the poiesis of life) we place ourselves at risk of flooding, unless like our pond, we allow life to flow on beyond us. We open to let life in, and we also open to let life out. The little Persian pond, with its openings on all sides reminds us that we cannot grasp, bottle, or contain the river’s flow without losing its life-giving vitality. As Gaston Bachelard reminds us in ‘The Poetics of Space’:
... one cannot bathe twice in the same river because already, in his inmost recesses, the human being shares the destiny of flowing water . . . A being dedicated to water is a being in flux. He dies every minute; something of his substance is constantly falling away.[ix]
If we are to ‘share the destiny of flowing water’, to bear the ‘falling away’ of life, we need to trust in the replenishing source. Drawing a human equivalence with the little pond, we might say that to remain vital, we too must both open to the flow of life coming in and also open outwards to transmit life beyond ourselves. We must be lovers and creators. It is by transmitting life that we learn to trust that there is always more life on its way.
And if, as we work, we can transmit life into our work, life, still more life, rushes into us to compensate, to be ready and we ripple with life through the days. [x] D.H. Lawrence
Opening to the upwelling and transmission of life is an act of courage and of faith. We cannot know what messages the unforeseen may carry. The writers of the New Testament described faith as ‘the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen’.[xi] In my experience, this faith in ‘the evidence of things not seen’ creates a kind of gravitational field which draws into view the tiniest specks of life in its becoming. These inklings surface in response to a quality of vision that has learned to trust in the life-giving poiesis, the abundant ‘bringing forth’ of life.
Distilling
The ducks in our Persian garden do not need to know the origin or destination of the river to experience something of its essential aliveness. They are content to encounter its vitality and freshness in the little pond which is their world. Likewise, the poet does not seek to encompass the whole story of life. She looks for life bubbling up in the here and now, in the small and the near, in the fleeting and the slight. For she knows, as William Blake avowed, that the universal is hidden in the particular. Heaven can be found in a wildflower, infinity in the palm of your hand.[xii]
Mary Oliver’s poem ‘Heron Rises From The Dark, Summer Pond’[xiii] offers us a consummate example of how intimate encounter with the particular, can reveal the condition of life itself. In just a few lines, the poet bears witness to the improbable flight of a ‘long-necked, long-bodied heron’ which rises slowly from the thick water of the summer pond, defying its own heaviness. She finds herself wondering:
how unlikely it is
that death us a hole in the ground,
how improbable
that ascension is not possible
Like the little pond in our Persian painting, each poem is a distillation of life, a moment of infinity held briefly in the palm of our hand. We find these qualities of distillation and implication most perfectly expressed in the tradition of haiku, like this one from Matsuo Bashō:
The temple bell stops –
but the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers[xiv]
The haiku, or hokku as it was known in Bashō’s day, is ‘one-breath poetry’, traditionally just seventeen syllables (5-7-5). The beauty of this poetic short form is that it is pocket size (like our little duck pond). Because we can hold the poem in our attention all at once, we can take in the manifold inference of its vision, without having to comprehend it in a linear way. The experience of its conception remains intact. Uninjured. Alive.
The haiku’s enigmatic power comes from all that it refuses to spell out. Bashō leaves us with a mere trace of the temple bell’s sounding. He suggests that the sound of the sacred is not confined to places of worship but vibrates all around us as the resonance of creation itself. The temple can fall. Religions come and go. But the sound of life ringing forth never ceases. All this in a mere dozen words.
Understanding that experience is only ever ‘a momentary enchantment plucked out of the vast world’[xv], the poet does not presume to encompass or define reality. Using language that gestures towards the ‘flickering universe’, he honours the potency of the implicit.
Longing
Contrary to the notion that poetry is the wispy musings of a head in the clouds, the poetic imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. Like the ducks, the poet does not stand on the bank at a distance. She wades in. Feeling the water lap around her, she longs to know directly something of the river’s unique quality of aliveness. Trusting that the current in the river is the same vital force which stirs in her own depths, she yearns for a contagion of aliveness.
We see this longing for contact in the depiction of Rudabeh and Zal. The princess lowers her long dark hair for the young man to climb up. The strength of their yearning is conveyed by the tautness of the braid and the intensity of their gaze towards each other. Somewhere deep in their original conception, both man and woman understand that the kindling of aliveness depends on reciprocity, interplay and mutuality.
Despite the vertical representation, there is no hierarchy here. Rudabeh (perhaps representing life in its becoming) longs to be known, to be beheld. In the warmth of her beholding, Zal feels his own vital qualities ignite. It is perhaps no accident that the young man’s tunic reflects the golden aura around the woman, for the same spark of aliveness is already alight in him. Rudabeh’s gaze is cherishing and kindling his spark. This mutuality of seeing kindles the flickering life within both seer and seen.
In these two lovers I recognise my own longing for contact, my own yearning to be known by life, and to know life, intimately. Standing in the stream I wish it could be ‘bothered’ by its diversion around my ankles. Leaning against an old oak tree, I yearn to feel it soften and yield to my touch. Hearing the first bright notes of a mistle thrush dispel the hush of winter, I long for it to reply to my own spring song. This longing strikes me as essentially human. The river, the oak and the mistle thrush do not appear to be beset by the anguish of separation. Neither are the ducks in the painting, as they splash about in their little pond. Like the trees and flowers of the Persian garden, they seem to be enjoying the grace of an easy communion with each other.
At one level, the depiction of Rudabeh and Zal is a familiar story of star-crossed lovers, but I sense the painting allows us to see something more fundamental about how human life keeps on ‘life-ing’. Life bubbles up in the gaps between us. New ideas, new ways of being are seeded in these liminal spaces because they confound our habitual perception. The gaps, suggests Nora Bateson, ‘are the place where pure possibility sits. It is in the connective process that the tautologies of the familiar have opportunities to rearrange’.[xvi]
Borrowing from biology, we might say that the gap between you and I is like a ‘synapse’ which activates transmission. Within the body, the ‘Synaptic Cleft’ is a microscopic space which separates each nerve ending from the fibre of an adjacent neuron. Neurotransmitters diffuse nerve impulses across the synaptic cleft. This diffusion across the gap produces postsynaptic potential (PSP) in the receiving membrane, which leads to what’s known as ‘action potential’. The ‘cleft’ (from the PIE root *gleubh meaning to ‘tear apart, cleave’) is a necessary ‘break’ which activates the transmission of implicit, inherent potential. This space in between is essential to the bringing forth, the poiesis, of life.
As human beings, our experience of the gap creates longing. And longing acts as a gravitational force drawing us towards ‘otherness’. This opening towards the unknown and the unforeseen is vital because it diversifies, enriches and matures the human spirit. The law of attraction creates fertile ground for the renewal and evolution of life. It is because I desire to close the gap between my experience and yours that I may open to seeing things from your point of view. Fresh life is conceived through this intercourse.
We have so much to learn from the ‘other-wise’ being which calls to us from the far side of the gap. And yet we suffer the gap. It can be tempting to deny it, to consume over it, to sublimate it. So much of our present collective suffering arises from a refusal to bear the gap. Instead of longing, we orientate our existence around instant gratification. Losing touch with our yearning, we forgo the possibility of contact with otherness. Instead of lovers and creators, we become consumers.
In the tender depiction of Rudabeh and Zal I begin to understand the vital importance of longing. Looking at the braid of raven hair which both separates and connects them, I sense we are perhaps all ‘sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.’[xvii]
Beholding
In this yearning to bridge the gap, we encounter another essential quality of poetic vision - the dedication of sustained attention to someone or something over time. It takes time to conceive life, time for otherness to diffuse across the synaptic gap, time for the spark to kindle, time for the whisper to become sound, time for the seed to swell. Time for mystery to disclose itself. Time is the poet’s temple. Poetry, in its literal and existential sense, comes to those who wait. Rebecca Solnit put this beautifully when she writes:
Waiting, attending to, and paying attention are in some sense the same thing, waiting to understand, waiting to know, staying until connection is formed, the taking-care-of that begins by taking notice of. Perhaps it’s all encompassed in the “continuous respectful attendance to the presence of the Divine.[xviii]
Beholding is the act of patiently holding a space open in time for a seed impression to swell into fullness, ‘ripening like a tree’, as Rilke wrote, ‘which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, without fear that after them the summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient.’[xix] As a psychotherapist I recognise the importance of not forcing the sap. I am committed to standing in the storms, without fear that the summer may not come. It does come. But only if I am patient.
Likewise, a poet does not scrutinise life. She contemplates each shape-shifting form in the hope of experiencing something of its ‘deep down freshness’, the fertilising gift of its otherness. To do this, she holds her attention open in time. Like the warmth of the sun on a tightly bound bud, her beholding eye is a life-cherishing force which unfurls the moment of experience, to reveal what Bashō called a ‘hidden glimmering.’[xx] Contact with this hidden glimmering, as we read in this counsel from eleventh century Chinese poet and painter Su-Tung Po, begins with gestation:
Before painting a bamboo,
it is necessary for the bamboo to grow in your soul.
Then, with a brush in hand and with eyes focused,
The vision will arise. [xxi]
Through the warmth our attention the inkling of fresh conception begins to grow in our soul, but first we have to bear with blindness. Reaching out towards the unforeseen, we encounter a trace, a hunch, a distant call. These fledgeling dimensions of experience have yet to be labelled. They are elusive and enigmatic by nature.
In their first sighting, our intimations are often beyond utterance. Poets articulate the hidden glimmering precisely because they stay with the unspoken and the unspeakable long enough for language to surface. As Emerson reminds us, gestating poetic vision can test us to the core.
Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own.[xxii] Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tongue-tied and dumb-founded, we suffer our separation from each other and from the living world, unless we find a way to build a bridge, or take hold of a rope. Language can be that rope, that dark tangle of hair thrown down to draw us closer to life
Wiggling
Language succeeds in conceiving and transmitting life where it makes us feel something in a new way, or where it clothes a familiar feeling within a skin of words which remains vital and fresh. Like Rudabeh’s braid of raven hair and like the tumbling stream, we human beings are fundamentally fluid. Our emotions are experiences-in-motion, so our language needs to move too. As Jay Griffiths reminds us in her book Wild, ‘all things that represent life at its most vital and wild wiggle. Words wiggle into metaphor.’[xxiii] The dynamics of our experience are most accurately and tenderly perceived through verbs that move and through symbols that clash together. These wiggling words are rarely found in technical glossaries, market analyses or psychology textbooks. They are woven into a vernacular vocabulary which has been seeded in us over generations, through our lived relationships to each other and to the natural world.
The refreshing little pond of our Mughal painting, with its openings for the stream to flow in and out, tells us so much about the life-giving nature of poetic expression. If the words we use are to conceive life, they need to remain open, capable of preserving the innate complexity, flexibility and manifold possibilities of imminence. Words which close off the shimmering ‘hesitation of life’ through definitive conception or categorical abstraction, dry up quickly and cease to transmit aliveness.
In his book Landmarks, a powerful meditation on language and landscape, Robert Macfarlane lists some words recently culled from the Oxford Junior Dictionary, words like acorn, adder, ash, beech and bluebell. This depletion of vocabulary leads inexorably to an impoverishment of perception itself. In place of ash, beech, oak, elm and birch, what we are now more likely to see is ‘tree’. In place of primrose, cowslip and dandelion we see ‘yellow flower’, or worse still ‘weed’. What is being lost here is the infinitely varied poetic vernacular that envisions the particular aliveness of each species. Cowslip originates in cu-slyppe meaning ‘cow dung’. It tells us about the place in which this tender little flower thrives. Dandelion derives from the French dent-de-lion, meaning ‘lion’s tooth’. Its name describes the coarsely toothed leaves that distinguish it from other yellow flowers. figurative words like these keep the story of each flower alive. They greet the living world in all its vital particularity.
As a traveller in the landscapes of human nature, I sense we are also losing our ability to name (and so to conceive) the vital particularity of our human ecology of feeling. Shorn of a native language of experience once rich in poetic imagery, we increasingly see our experiences of life through muddy mood words like ‘fine’ and ‘OK’, or through diagnostic monoliths like ‘anxiety’ and ‘depression’. These bland descriptors seal up the ‘flickering universe’ of feelings, thoughts and sensations. Disconnected from the poetic articulation of our own aliveness, we become trapped in a stagnant pond. I sometimes wonder if ‘depression’ is not, at some level, an expression of the staleness of lives which cannot flow on because they are sealed in by a vocabulary choked up with opaque and calcified nouns. Increasingly trapped between the objectifying language of old science and the abstract language of new technology, we taxonomize life. Life ceases to flow through us. So much vitality (our native poiesis) is lost in this desecration of language.
In Landmarks Macfarlane reminds us that ‘we see in words. In webs of words, wefts of words, woods of words.’[xxiv] We naturally conceive our experience of the world around and within us through figures of speech (clusters of picture words and story words). This essentially composite language can help shape the emergent and the ineffable, as well as the difficult and the painful. The good news is that we do not have to look very far to find this more vital tongue, for buried in our native dialects lie figures of speech rich in symbol. Our everyday language is littered with metaphor. ‘I can’t seem to get anything off the ground’ we say, ‘he’s playing his cards close to his chest’, ‘she took the bull by the horns’, or ‘he made my blood boil.’ Truth is we are all wired for figurative expression. All of us. It’s in our blood. The problem is that we have increasingly separated ‘poetry’ from the poetic nature of life itself and made it out to be the lexicon of a literary elite.
It seems to me that psychology needs poetry now more than ever. For, as Mary Oliver reminds us, figurative language can ‘make visible and felt that which is invisible and unfeelable’.[xxv] In our effort to present psychology as science we have largely ditched the other-wise vision of our native poetic articulation. Caught in the trawler net of diagnostic labels like ‘depression’ and ‘anxiety’, we lose the particular insight seeded in words like ‘bereft’, ‘despondent’ and ‘bewildered’. Untethered from the insight of our own lyrical vision, we dam up the stream of life.
In my therapy practice and in my life more widely, I’m looking for green shoots, fresh currents, original fire. Recognising life itself as poetry in motion, I try to avoid words that pin life to the board. Following the poet’s example, I choose words that wiggle, and phrases that pulse, shimmer and spark life into being. The purpose of this kindling utterance is enlivenment, which is to say, to pass a flaming torch between my hand to yours.
* * *
In a world defined by instant gratification, we rarely linger long enough these days for the ‘dearest freshness’ of life to flow into our own little pond. Severed from the replenishing source, our yearning turns to despair, our longing to greed. The urge to define and to possess replaces the desire to create and to love.
Thanks to Rudabeh and Zal, to the stream, the pond and the ducks, I begin to understand that poetry is not just a way of writing about the world, it is a way of bringing forth life, of manifesting our participation in a world which exists in a permanent state of revelation. Understood in this way, poetic vision is not mere fancy, not a distraction from the serious business of scientific objectivity. It is vital in all aspects of life. For we cherish and protect what we come to know intimately over time, but we plunder and exploit what we covet through the cursory glance. Seen through the beholding gaze, the manifold wonders of life find purchase in our hearts.
So much hinges on a heart enamoured with the world, on a vision open to experience the grace of life in its becoming. Stepping into the vital magic of a sixteenth century Persian painting, I find myself imagining a world where we might all be encouraged to ‘splash about’, to linger, to long for and to love in the freshness of that little pond which is this one precious life.
* * *
Zal approaches the palace of Rudabeh
Page from a manuscript of Ferdowsi’s Shah-Nama (‘Book of Kings’) Mughal court workshops, Lahore or Agra. Opaque watercolour and gold on paper. “The Keir Collection of Islamic Art” on loan to the Victoria & Albert Museum: V.006
END NOTES
[i] Susan Holliday, Touchstones, www.susanholliday.co.uk/inklings
[ii] Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur, ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose’ (Penguin Classics, 1985).
[iii] Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (third Letter), Trans. M.D Herter Norton (W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 1954).
[iv] Meister Eckart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart (Crossroads Publishing Company, 2009).
[v] Paul Cézanne, Conversations with Cézanne, ed. By Michael Doran (University of California Press, 2001).
[vi] Nora Bateson, ‘Aphanipoesis’, from her collection of essays Combining (Triarchy Press, 2023).
[vii] Agnes De Mille, Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham (Vintage, 1992).
[viii] Albert Einstein, ‘Letter to Heinrich Zangger, 10 March 1914’ (The Albert Einstein Archives).
[ix] Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams an Essay on the Imagination of Matter (Dallas Institute of Humanities & Culture, 2021).
[x] D.H. Lawrence, We are Transmitters, The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence (Wordsworth Poetry Library,1994).
[xi] The New Testament: Hebrews 11.1
[xii] William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, ‘William Blake: The Complete Poems’ (Penguin Classics, 1977).
[xiii] Mary Oliver, ‘Heron Rises From The Dark, Summer Pond’, in Felicity: Poems (Penguin Books, 2017)
[xiv] Matsuo Bashō, ‘The Temple Bell Stops’ (haiku translated by Robert Bly), from The sea and the honeycomb; A book of tiny poems, by Robert Bly (Beacon Press, 1971).
[xv] Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook (Harper Collins Publishers, 1994).
[xvi] Nora Bateson, ‘Aphanipoesis’, from her collection of essays Combining (Triarchy Press, 2023).
[xvii] Kahil Gibran, The Prophet (Vintage Books, 2013).
[xviii] Rebecca Solnit, Introduction to ‘Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World’ by Barry Lopez (Random House New York, 2022).
[xix] Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (third Letter), Trans. By M.D Herter Norton (W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 1954)
[xx] Matsuo Bashō, from the Introduction to The Narrow Road to the Deep North, trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa (Penguin Books, 1966).
[xxi] Master Sung Tung Po, eleventh century poet and painter.
[xxii] Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844, The Poet (Create Space, 2017).
[xxiii] Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey (Penguin, 2006
[xxiv] Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks (Penguin, 2015).
[xxv] Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook (Harper Collins Publishers, 1994).
[xxvi] Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (third Letter), Trans. By M.D Herter Norton (W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 1954).
‘Zal approaches the palace of Rudabeh’, page from a manuscript of Ferdowsi’s Shah-Nama (‘Book of Kings’) c.1590, from ‘The Keir Collection of Islamic Art’, on loan to the Victoria & Albert Museum, London 2025.
