drawing the sources

“In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts
as they are for us in favor of the facts as they are.
The primary impulse of each is to maintain and aggrandise himself.
The secondary impulse is to go out of the self,
to correct its provincialism and heal its loneliness.”

~ C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

sources

With the passing of time, my attention is increasingly drawn to the roots of my experiences. Lived experience refers to present, as well as past; sensed as well as seen, remembered as well as immediate. Sources never cease to compel. A passing glance that causes me to look again and consider will invariably bring my attention to the source of the idea, the provenance of a scenario. It is a thirst to know meaning beneath the visible. And then there is the draw of sources themselves: the books that ignite the imagination, the individuals that inspire, the places that hold intrinsic and deeply personal references to the sacred. My lifelong fascinations with waterfalls and the vast ocean find parallels when listening to eloquent elders describe their stories, or when reading manuscripts from distant times. Sources speak from places and ages I could not have witnessed.

Enduring sources are timeless and cannot be exhausted. These represent tastes of the Wellspring of life, which can neither be measured nor extinguished. Peering through the glass aboard a surfaced Boston subway train, hurtling across the Longfellow Bridge, the contrast between dark tunnel and bright sky was impossible not to notice. This same sensation occurs to me, just about every time I reach the outdoor portion of the inbound subway trip. From darkened mirrors facing in, to sudden and clear outward views. The Charles River, distant buildings, and the broad sky overhead, extend my focus and remind me of the sources of all that is before me. Indeed, the very Source, the Divine, the ground of being, is solidly present such that my fleeting attention is caught away by small components. Henry David Thoreau astutely warned how easily our lives are frittered away in detail. Whether or not he succeeded in his living experiment at Walden Pond, his brilliant writing left us a document of his motivation to live deliberately, and to confront the essentials in life. It becomes vital to unburden and approach the sources of life and inspiration.

Walden Pond


experiences

My experience shows me how sources take many forms and manifestations. I’ve already mentioned such tangibles as physical sites, individuals, literary sources, and even the heart’s direct experience of God. In addition, there are repositories cultivated within, made of one’s collected source material. We may list our diplomas, their granting institutions, and a selection of jobs in our résumés, but these inventories do not describe our formation. There are sources which have made us the working, thinking, interacting persons that we are. Consider how and where you were raised, from infancy and right up until you could choose your own mentors. On the occasions in which some of my teachers and professors would tell me about those under whom they had studied (“under” as though beneath a tree!), I’d reflect that I somehow joined a kind of lineage- a genealogy of learning. Naming off where and what we studied in our formal schooling is merely at the surface. Where and what was the learning- not just then, but now?

Consider the people, cultures, and trends that comprise your influences. My oratory style is an amalgam of my father, my favorite graduate school history professors, and one of my Benedictine monk friends. My culinary and penmanship methods bear my mother’s stamp, as does my taste for irony. Many of my manners and organizing sensibilities are owed to my years of lived experience in monastic communities. A long list could follow, but instead and for this purpose, it will suffice to say the sources dearest to me have been the ones that have guided me to sources. The particular subway ride I described was en route to the Boston Athenaeum library, a place introduced to me by school friends. Learning, perceiving, and creativity continue long and far beyond the old lecture halls. Sources produce beginnings, and further sources provide sustenance.

extension

Drawing from wellsprings does not have hoarding as its goal. It is quite the opposite, for me. Collected knowledge and impressions add rungs to our ladders. Ascents progressively heighten and descents deepen, as thoughts of self occupy less space at the center. Learning, at its most redeemable, is best applied when offered as a compassionate extension. My notebooks record history while providing future references. These incidental uses have proven to be as gratifying as informative. Indeed the enjoyment of writing, in itself, remains primary. What motivates discovery are hopes for the extending of hard-earned knowledge and comprehension. Thirst for wisdom is matched by desire to diffract and share the Light within.

Above: Restoring a treasured source for an elderly friend.
Below: His hands with the restored book

In some critical ways, those who assiduously pursue the Divine for the purpose of lived application are the uncommon torchbearers. The light must be carried through undetermined crepuscule, to be potential light for others. Through waystations and on the road, learning must continue with care, so that it can be spun into reinforcing fibers. There remain great and unknown distances to cover. But I do not venture without provision. Not only are my teachers’ and parents’ lessons and stories accompanying me, but also the imprints of their mannerisms and voices. What is expressed is as important as how it’s said. A disciple is taught more than skills and methodologies; through personal mentoring, style is transmitted. Thus, facts are accompanied by techniques. Conversely, committed and witnessed errors of the past can inform discernment, and prevent repetition. We extend and manifest our received learning.

development and vocation

Pausing at this precipice of time, it is as necessary to pose the questions of cultivation as it is to ask the purposes of desire. Over the years, I’ve been making every effort within my economic and time limitations to choose how I add to my learning. Often, such decisions affect my travels, and the pursuit of wise words and artworks joins my pilgrimage. Now I recall William Armstrong’s admiring commentary about the self-taught Abraham Lincoln, who “gave back as rain what he received as mist.”

“He received his knowledge as mist, because he had so little time to learn. No one provided him with books and classes and study halls. He snatched his study periods between hours of hewing away the wilderness and fighting hunger.”*

By noting thoughts, quotations, and moments in a journal, maintaining a spirit of research, the average day can yield a manuscript collection. With a balanced sense of enquiry, a corresponding sense of expression can be developed. Feeling, thinking, and willing have been called the three primary functions of the human mind. Each are needed, along with an ability to visualize the “big picture.” Returning to Thoreau’s ideas, as I know to maintain a broad view amidst life’s transactions and demands, then I would succeed at carrying my own portable shore of Walden Pond with me. His use of deliberate is what this century might call conscientious. A clear sense of intention, of vocation, provides a guideline for life emphases and study.

Above: Taizé, France.
Below: Walden Pond, Massachusetts.

A vocation is often referred to as a calling, and this is misconstrued when viewed in a passive light. Vocation is not simply a subtle impression of God to a human. It is the reaching for a person by the very Spirit of Creation, and the initiation of an eternity of relational discourse. Going to the sources of trust and strength is a response, and the purpose is at once to draw out and to be infused by the holiness that transcends corruption. Having drawn from life-giving sources, the succeeding purpose is extension. Hence, calling is a great deal more than to merely believe, but to relate and to act. Our very physical design implies receptivity and reaching out, comprehension and active response. And collected knowledge and insights must find their means for extension to benefit others, and thus, the universe of knowledge itself. Be assured, consoled, and strengthened: even in this culture of mirages, learning and a proximity to the sources of trust and wisdom cannot diminish either in value or in urgency.

__________________
  * Study is Hard Work, by William H. Armstrong

walden pond

“At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things,
we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable,
that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and
unfathomed by us because unfathomable.
We can never have enough of nature...
We need to see our own limits transgressed,
and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.”

~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden


Transitioning seasons and colder air invite me outdoors. Such liminal spans occur to me as “vignetting times,” recalling the ways I’d blend and fade edges of photographic images by vignetting exposures in the darkroom. The motions of time are clearly visible now, and the elements call me away from my confines. Driving winding back roads and hiking forests and shores, early-autumn shows resemblances to early-spring. The draw of creation combines with a welcome: a rarified sense of belonging so elusive in society. The thicker the clouds, the more evident the embrace. Proximity with a long view.

To be welcomed is to be received: to be recognized and blended into an environment. When is welcome transformative? Ponder the occasions when you’ve experienced a mutual acceptance with others- perhaps even in your prayers. Thinking of my sojourns in monastic communities brings to mind what can happen when individuals pursue lives that welcome one another’s presence. With this mindset, I’ve seen how such discipline and conscientiousness also translates as a perception that considers the self and others as part of a greater entirety. Those experiences of learning by example have strongly influenced my view and practice of friendship and collegiality. And being well-acquainted with times during which welcomes have been elusive, I keep an eye out for those who themselves experience unwelcome. This has been done for me, as well, and such rare generosity is impossible to forget. On his ascent of Mount Katahdin in 1846, Henry David Thoreau experienced a silently profound welcome by the Maine wilderness itself. Not a greeting campfire, nor groups of travellers; “no face welcomed us but the fine fantastic sprays of free and happy evergreen trees, waving one above another in their ancient home.” A gracious guest responds to an invitation with reverential wonder.

As Thoreau was welcomed by the Maine woods, so I found a quiet welcome of my own at his place. The present-day comparison between the region around Mount Katahdin and Concord, Massachusetts is surely much more pronounced than it had been 165 years ago. But somehow, despite some long-established encroachment emanating from greater Boston, the Walden Pond area is surprisingly serene. I didn’t expect that. Even the markers corresponding to Thoreau are sparing and understated. His cabin’s site is neatly marked with small granite posts and its replica is far enough away, at the entrance to the state park. On the original site, I stopped to write in my journal beside Thoreau’s hearth, looking from there to the water as he would have done. True to this vignetting season, the day was pensively overcast with cool cloud-calmed air filtering through the woods. The pond has the breadth of a small lake, and hiking its periphery on narrow paths I was treated to numerous views through gaps in the trees at the mirroring water. Very simply, my thoughts were taken up with admiring the beauty of the place.

On my way to Walden Pond, I’d stopped at the Concord Public Library to see Thoreau’s manuscripts. There, in the archives, I was able to see Thoreau’s own depth survey of Walden Pond, the maps he created of contiguous regions, and his original handwritten essays. Not to be missed, I asked to see pencils made at the innovative and illustrious Thoreau pencil factory. Though he found his greatest inspirations in natural environments and the wilderness, Thoreau was technologically savvy. He discovered ways to streamline the production of pencils by blending clay with locally-mined graphite. Thoreau’s technique was enormously successful. He even worked out methods of mixing the clay and graphite such that degrees (from 1 to 4) of hardness/softness in pencils could meet consumers’ needs. As a side-note Charles Thomas Jackson, geologist to the State of Maine (and brother-in-law of Ralph Waldo Emerson) used Thoreau pencils to write his surveys- which included Mount Katahdin.

Above: some of Thoreau's land surveys.
(I wasn't permitted to photograph his prose manuscripts.)

Below: the Concord archivist displays a Thoreau pencil,
which has a squared graphite rod inside the cedar casing.

As captivating as the artifacts were, it was the outdoors that I really longed for. From Walden Pond, the next two days were filled with back roads, forests, and hiking. Noticing the peaks of the Berkshire Mountains, I began to wonder about the draw of the woods. Why retreat to silence and stillness? What do peaceful forests, mountains, and oceans teach us? What is concealed beyond the silence, which requires our listening?

These questions returned to me, back home in Maine, while hiking a winding path near the ocean- once again under deliciously heavy skies that were ripe with rain. My answers began with recalling the state of mind I tend to have whenever I return from sojourns in the woods: a calmer and cleaner slate. Such natural elements as the woods and the ocean remind me of the vastness and variety of creation. Too often the world is reduced to a cubicle; we have to know when we can break out of the box. The draw of wilderness places may be the places and sights, but there are results which accompany us on our ways through and back, such as clarity of thought, serenity of mind, and strengthening of spirit. Just the other day, along a trail that became a deep crevasse, I stopped and looked up at the tall trees rising high above both sides. Directly above were shifting clouds. Through the composite was an audible silence, and after dining on the quiet for a good while, leaning on a boulder I wrote, “vast skies inspire raised eyes.” Sights are serendipitously unpredictable. On uneven trails, one must pay attention- sometimes with every step. I take to the trails to hear that silence; I go in order to let go. Realizing what cannot be grasped, release the grip.

Between a welcome such as that received by Thoreau, by “the glassy smoothness of the sleeping lake,” and the embraces of loved ones, profound significance and meaning are added to our days. Places and experiences to be kept close to heart. As with the maps we hold within, these are for us to reference for all our years. Drawing from a place of strength can be equally along a trail as from the soul’s depths. If the adage is true, that we read to know we’re not alone, I’ll add that I write to remember I have a voice. I’m aware of that, especially along trails- and- under those big skies, my thoughts are brought down to an assuring proportion. My perspective reveals as a bicycle wheel that needs truing- whose propensities require realignment. Looking to changing foliage and turning tides reminds me of all that is in my sights, yet beyond my control- though I am somehow part of these elements.

Aperch at Thoreau's hearthside, Walden Pond cabin site.