Good Grief (16)
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What the Mind Cannot Name
"A visitor's witnessing"
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I'm beginning to understand something about rituals here. They weren't meant to control or capture. Like how breathing doesn't catch air but dances with it. They were for receiving what creation offered, staying within its flow. Like cupping hands to drink from a stream rather than damming it.
But something shifted. Maybe it was gradual, like forgetting the taste of rain. Humans forgot this fundamental relationship with natural reality. Started existing as if separate from everything else. As if loneliness was the price of being special. Life became about self - self-interest, self-survival, self as the only real thing.
Different cultures drew different edges around what they called reality. Some edges soft as moss, others sharp as glass. Each deciding where the known world ended and mystery began. Some kept that edge soft, permeable. Like a door that swings both ways in the wind. Others made it hard.
I notice the Western mind tried something particular. It collected names like some collect buttons - shiny, numerous, somehow never enough. It named everything based on human experience with it. Labeled, categorized, filed away. Even mystery got a filing cabinet. But maybe this naming created more forgetting? When you think you know what something is, you stop feeling what it does.
The purpose of things within the larger ecology - that got lost in all the naming. Like losing the melody while writing down notes. Memory still flows through everything, but intellectualized minds can't feel the current anymore. Their thoughts make too much noise. Too busy thinking about water to notice they're thirsty.
This civilization seems built from that kind of thinking. Thoughts stacked on thoughts like a very serious house of cards. The mind pursuing existence rather than experiencing mystery. And this forgetting - it causes real harm. The kind that doesn't know it's harm, which might be the saddest kind. To land. To people. To the intricate connections that keep everything alive.
What the ancients called mysteries can't be thought into being. They arrive like cats - only when you're not trying. You can't think nature. Nature has to be felt. Like how stones know your weight without mathematics.
I watch people here grieving this particular loss. They hold dictionaries but hunger for songs. The grief of having named everything but knowing nothing. Of being surrounded by life but feeling separate from it. Like being at a party behind glass. Of trying to think their way back to something that was never a thought to begin with.
Maybe this is why rituals feel familiar even when they're new. The body keeps receipts the mind never filed. The body remembers what the thinking mind forgot - how to receive rather than take. How to feel rather than name. How to be the river rather than the one watching it. How to be within rather than apart from.
Some griefs can only be felt through. They're shy of words, like deer at the edge of meaning. Not solved, not named, not intellectualized. Just felt, like weather passing through, like seasons turning, like the mysteries that continue whether we remember them or not. Patient as mushrooms, inevitable as morning.
Still learning to feel rather than know. Still discovering my thoughts have been wearing shoes indoors all this time. Still witnessing the difference.
