I might never have found God elsewhere. I had never been a religious person. I found that the mountains and forests are spiritual places. The distance between Heaven and Earth is less. It is easy to encounter the sacred. I felt a growing sense of connection to something beyond myself, and belief took root at the edges of my mind.
Once on a retreat in a heavily forested area of Canada I came across the biggest and most beautiful oak tree I have ever seen, standing on its own, apart from the other trees. I knew instantly that my Celtic and Germanic ancestors would have worshipped it, and understood why. That tree seemed like the embodiment of some divine energy.
Again, at a farm house in rural County Galway, standing outside at the end of the day, I felt a kind of "crowded presence" and now get why my ancestors believed in fairies.
Nature really does seem to be a visible effect or expression of an ineffable something, or someone. Alive in ways that go way beyond what we can think or imagine.
I don't mean to constantly beat the Eastern religion drum here, but only mention this because I care: in what you say above, Steve, you are very close to the Chinese, Taoist idea of the Tao, very close indeed. Have you ever read Lao Tzu or Chuang Tzu, the two foremost Taoist sages? They can at times be hard to fathom (heaven knows I often don't fathom them), but they repay study to the n-th degree. And as I say, you are coming awfully close to them in what you have just written.
Bill Porter/Red Pine's translation of Lao Tzu's Tao te Ching, and Burton Watson's of Chuang Tzu would be a great place to start, if interested.
Or very close to what the indigenous people believe about nature and our connection to it. I suggest Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. A wonderful read. Very thought provoking. I appreciate your intuitive insights, too, Steve.
I wonder about Gaia. The residual orthodoxy in me bristles at the notion, fearing idolatry, but my executive function has learned how to tell it to shut up and listen. The intuition of the systems, the relationships among living beings, maybe most evident after reading Peter Wohlleben on the community of the forest, has elbowed its way back into our popular imagination with a newfound respectability. Gaia may be a placeholder we use as we wonder about how nature changes, renews itself evolves. Does Gaia laugh at our arrogance in claiming that we have endangered nature's systems, that our initiative can "save" the world?
Some will want to label it as a new paganism, I suppose. So what? Seeing these systems is much like listening to music by listening for the spaces between the notes. Kinda Zen. But if you've had the intuition, you know there's something there. Something real, vital, vibrant. The term "systems" is a placeholder, an ugly prose concession adopted by one who lacks the vision and craft of poetry or other means of arts making which may be the discipline needed to share what is beheld. I suppose that leaves the question, what is beheld? I might suggest that wrestling with the question is much to be preferred to coming up with easy, rote answers.
Nov 3, 2023·edited Nov 3, 2023Liked by Steve Skojec
Martin Heidegger made, in my mind, brilliant inroads into this theme. He spent his entire adult life trying to untangle the metaphysics of Veritas and its beginnings in Plato and Aristotle (and later codified into Catholicism via Thomas Aquinas) from the pre-Socratic (Parmenides and Heraclitus) understanding of truth as Aletheia, or unconcealing. In his later writings, he talks about the "gleaming" of Nature (Being) through the landscape of visible objects (being). This gleaming is the wonder and astonishment of nature, of the world around us. It is a "seeing" of that which cannot actually be seen but which gleams and shines through the unfolding of the landscape. The mystery. The sense of the divine. Heidegger, an atheist, saw this gleaming and wonderment as "the holy." This is a different sense of truth from that of Veritas, which comes with metaphysics and "the rules."
Truly fascinating. If you study Heidegger, you will find yourself constantly weighing Metaphysics and Phenomenolology, or, Veritas and Aletheia, as you are implicitly doing here. The brilliance of Heidegger was that he put all this to a life of philosophical rigor. If you are looking for an intellectual roadmap on these questions of "the rules I'm told I must believe" versus "astonishment," he would be your man. The challenge is that his writings are opaque and take dedication to interpret. The buzzkill is that he was a Nazi to the day he died. If you can get past that elephant in the room, it's a great intellectual exercise. He was too brilliant to ignore.
Brilliant Steve! Thank you so much for being such a good guide. Love your content. I’m curious: did you use AI to create this video? Guessing you recorded the voice message and then AI turned it into a video, based on your prompts? What did you use? Abrazo!
Once on a retreat in a heavily forested area of Canada I came across the biggest and most beautiful oak tree I have ever seen, standing on its own, apart from the other trees. I knew instantly that my Celtic and Germanic ancestors would have worshipped it, and understood why. That tree seemed like the embodiment of some divine energy.
Again, at a farm house in rural County Galway, standing outside at the end of the day, I felt a kind of "crowded presence" and now get why my ancestors believed in fairies.
Nature really does seem to be a visible effect or expression of an ineffable something, or someone. Alive in ways that go way beyond what we can think or imagine.
I don't mean to constantly beat the Eastern religion drum here, but only mention this because I care: in what you say above, Steve, you are very close to the Chinese, Taoist idea of the Tao, very close indeed. Have you ever read Lao Tzu or Chuang Tzu, the two foremost Taoist sages? They can at times be hard to fathom (heaven knows I often don't fathom them), but they repay study to the n-th degree. And as I say, you are coming awfully close to them in what you have just written.
Bill Porter/Red Pine's translation of Lao Tzu's Tao te Ching, and Burton Watson's of Chuang Tzu would be a great place to start, if interested.
In any event, lovely column. Thank you.
I've looked into it a little. I haven't read deeply. I've watched a handful of videos about it, and the art of letting go.
As someone who is overly anxious/worried pretty much all the time, learning to let go is a thing I certainly need to be better at.
Or very close to what the indigenous people believe about nature and our connection to it. I suggest Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. A wonderful read. Very thought provoking. I appreciate your intuitive insights, too, Steve.
Excellent point, Lana! I think my wife has read Ms. Kimmerer's book. I'll have to borrow it...
“Maybe if God were something like that...”
I am sure God IS like that!
I wonder about Gaia. The residual orthodoxy in me bristles at the notion, fearing idolatry, but my executive function has learned how to tell it to shut up and listen. The intuition of the systems, the relationships among living beings, maybe most evident after reading Peter Wohlleben on the community of the forest, has elbowed its way back into our popular imagination with a newfound respectability. Gaia may be a placeholder we use as we wonder about how nature changes, renews itself evolves. Does Gaia laugh at our arrogance in claiming that we have endangered nature's systems, that our initiative can "save" the world?
Some will want to label it as a new paganism, I suppose. So what? Seeing these systems is much like listening to music by listening for the spaces between the notes. Kinda Zen. But if you've had the intuition, you know there's something there. Something real, vital, vibrant. The term "systems" is a placeholder, an ugly prose concession adopted by one who lacks the vision and craft of poetry or other means of arts making which may be the discipline needed to share what is beheld. I suppose that leaves the question, what is beheld? I might suggest that wrestling with the question is much to be preferred to coming up with easy, rote answers.
"The residual orthodoxy in me bristles at the notion, fearing idolatry, but my executive function has learned how to tell it to shut up and listen"
This is such a good, succinct explanation of an experience I encounter almost every day, in some form or other.
Martin Heidegger made, in my mind, brilliant inroads into this theme. He spent his entire adult life trying to untangle the metaphysics of Veritas and its beginnings in Plato and Aristotle (and later codified into Catholicism via Thomas Aquinas) from the pre-Socratic (Parmenides and Heraclitus) understanding of truth as Aletheia, or unconcealing. In his later writings, he talks about the "gleaming" of Nature (Being) through the landscape of visible objects (being). This gleaming is the wonder and astonishment of nature, of the world around us. It is a "seeing" of that which cannot actually be seen but which gleams and shines through the unfolding of the landscape. The mystery. The sense of the divine. Heidegger, an atheist, saw this gleaming and wonderment as "the holy." This is a different sense of truth from that of Veritas, which comes with metaphysics and "the rules."
Truly fascinating. If you study Heidegger, you will find yourself constantly weighing Metaphysics and Phenomenolology, or, Veritas and Aletheia, as you are implicitly doing here. The brilliance of Heidegger was that he put all this to a life of philosophical rigor. If you are looking for an intellectual roadmap on these questions of "the rules I'm told I must believe" versus "astonishment," he would be your man. The challenge is that his writings are opaque and take dedication to interpret. The buzzkill is that he was a Nazi to the day he died. If you can get past that elephant in the room, it's a great intellectual exercise. He was too brilliant to ignore.
Fascinating. Thank you.
Brilliant Steve! Thank you so much for being such a good guide. Love your content. I’m curious: did you use AI to create this video? Guessing you recorded the voice message and then AI turned it into a video, based on your prompts? What did you use? Abrazo!
No, actually, the video was 100% me. Good old fashioned editing.