Please Maintain Your Distance

"cusps of the spirit"

I have just finished reading the most extraordinary book, Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson. This story can be read in so many ways but, at the end of it, I closed the book and thought of the ways we hem in our lives by the way we live, increasingly separated from and oblivious to the world of senses and intuition. Watching farms and trees disappear and pastures that grow housing developments that reflect, in their manufactured tedium, as little character and uniqueness as we now prescribe to each other. As our world virtualizes so does our distance widen from the foundational forms of our earth - the trees, the soil, the sounds of birds - replaced by bulldozers and virtual nature.

We live increasingly narrow lives limited more and more by our technology which seems to engender even more narrowness - I think we hoped for or thought, for a while, that technology would enlarge our world and increase our connections. In some very valuable ways it has. Zoom swept in during Covid when many people became painfully aware of disconnection and loneliness. Those virtual spaces were often our only means to stay connected to our family and friends, the only way to maintain the business of our lives - a best attempt to move us out of our living rooms and back into the world - if only two dimensionally. We could see and hear but not touch, not smell, not taste our food together. And we were deprived of what is now labeled as a “sixth” sense - that is “proprioception,” - the body's sense of its own position and movement in space. Our space was confined to our homes and our movements, in public, to lines drawn, providing the illusion of safety. Our distance from people became mandated “Please maintain at least 6 feet from the person in front of you.” Many warning signs carried the unfortunate messaging as “social distancing.”

Technology lived through social media still maintains that comfortable “social distancing” among us - this all too safe distance that prevents us from engaging our full sensory and intuitive natures. We want to connect but please maintain your distance - do not invade my space - and certainly don’t friend me if your opinions differ from mine. Or, I like nature but now it’s too hot or too cold, too muddy, too wet - the recent theory of Gaia, as Earth’s revenge, now sets us at war with Nature. Again, along with “social distancing” a most unfortunate marketing message - to be at war with the Earth - instead of recognizing that to be at war with the Earth is to be at war with each other. Surely we know this. Intuitively.

In one of the numerously stunning passages in Housekeeping, the main character and narrator of the story, Ruthie, describes a time during a great flood in her hometown....

“The lake still thundered and groaned, the flood waters still brimmed and simmered. When we did not move or speak, there was no proof that we were there at all. The wind and the water brought sounds intact from any imaginable distance. Deprived of all perspective and horizon, I found myself reduced to an intuition, and my sister and my aunt to something less than that. I was afraid to put out my hand, for fear it would touch nothing, or to speak, for fear no one would answer.”

And yet deprived of our usual horizons we are forced into another sensibility - an intuition. We can trace our ability to see, hear, taste, smell and touch to bodily organs and when asked “how do you hear” we might quickly answer “with our ears” and “how do you see” - “with our eyes.” But to ask “how do you intuit” would probably be met with blank stares and a quick dismissal.

Intuit - the verb form of Intuition:

“Spiritual insight or perception; immediate apprehension by the mind without intervention of reasoning; direct or immediate insight.” Oxford English Dictionary

At some time in our species history, before the light of fire or electricity - when only the stars and the moon and the sun lit our way - our intuition and dominant reliance on our senses and intuition was the difference between life and death. We had to “smell” danger, in the same way that our pet dogs still do today, in the same way that cattle know to seek higher ground prior to a tsunami, in the same way birds stop singing and find refuge long before a hurricane makes land. This astounding collaboration of senses and intuition that keep us alive. Not only just keeping us alive but awakening us, reminding us, of the full depth and richness available to us when we live with spirit.

In his book, Small Graces, Kent Nerburn speaks about what one can sense if we remain attuned to “catch these cusps of the spirit.”

Years ago I lived by the sea...searching for the magical moment when the earth would hold its breath as the tide changed...I would wait for this moment, sometimes catching it, sometimes missing it - it was so subtle...but when I was able to be in its presence, a shiver would go through me...I would mention it to others, and they would just laugh. “You can’t feel the tides change,” they would say. But the old timers knew. “It’s there,” they would say. “You just got to learn how to listen.”

This is what it is to live fully in the world with our sense and our intuition aligned - smelling, listening, seeing, feeling, touching, and sensing each moment of change in a never ending kaleidoscope of color and form.