Words of Wonder: On Earthly mysteries & the roots of our being

There are teachings, books and writers to whom I return often. Having once been moved by encountering certain wisdoms, I find there are certain words that bed down in my consciousness. Sometimes this is because I've pored over them, transcribed and pondered them in my own private written reflections. Or the sense of what they've evoked in me has touched a nerve somewhere, such that I continue to be moved as life causes me to remember and apply certain ideas.

And so I go back, and see/feel/consider afresh the same texts. It's also because it's what I do, as a reader turned writer. It's because I love a turn of phrase and the magical nature of how words inspire, and because I've learned this from others, that I do what I do.

Lately, this involves writing about, and therefore reading and researching about, humanity's changing relationship with the Earth, our interconnection (and lately, disconnection) with the roots of our being - in ancestral and familial terms, and with regards to the causes and consequences of climate change.

Hence I've been rooting around in stories about the same, learning from, learning how, and working with, writers who who seek to positively change the world, or rather our understanding with it, so as to remember the inherent value of it.

As ever, I share what I've happened upon by way of an invitation for you to similarly do the same - linger over the words, consider what they mean to you, engage with the ideas, be open to what they invoke and evoke. They only mean something when we do that, when we feel, integrate and maybe change our way of being/doing.

After all, isn't that the magic of communication - the way it prompts a response, a connection, a movement in heart, mind and matter? It seems apt to open with the oft-quoted words of James Baldwin:

“You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to how people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimetre the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”