What Is Holding It Together?
by Nora Bateson
[Listen to Audio!]
 For you, a respite of uncontainability. Safe pages for words, to taste them as they find their rightness. Let them rest in their silky beds of lyrical dreams. Let them run like rivers down mountain-sides, arranging curves and switches where the textures change. Thoughts yet unmet arrive in cloaks of language, becoming bards to take you where you can see that you are wide inside.
Words are delicious, but cannot say much. They often lose the water of meaning before it is delivered. But they can be stirred to form descriptions of the breath, glances, gestures, and pulses between lives. Perhaps writing is finding a scrape in the skin of knowing, where the sting and dirt and blood of the day is let out, and music is let in.
There is no language to define the spiraling processes of the vast context we are participants in. We do not have names for the patterns of interdependency. To lock down the delicate filigree of life in explanation is to lose it, but not to see it is disastrous. Words are what we have. The why, of why we do anything at all, matters.
An inside-out kaleidoscope—a de-fragmenter—might be useful for looking at a fractured order through a lens of unity. A superhero in a comic book might have such a tool at her belt. The way we see affects what we do, in both the broad strokes of global study, and the details of a day. Playing with the limits of our perception, our knowing, and tweaking the cultural script is like using a lemon juice wash to reveal the invisible ink and unspoken scaffolding we inhabit.
The ink of interrelationship bleeds across the boundaries between professionalism, academic research, and the banality of daily life. Theory and philosophy are stained with the mundane and both are vis-à-vis. What holds this collection of sightings together? What holds anything together? Glue is superficial, so not that. Thread is better, sewing, mending the torn-apart seams of perception—possibly. It is the right question—what is holding it together?—and the question alone might be the source of inquiry. Surely a search for the elegance in a mess of weighted compensations, and river-washed shapings of the context of life, is enough of a spine. Perhaps?
About the Author: Nora Bateson‘s excerpt from the opening chapter of her book, Small Arcs of Larger Circles.
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What Is Holding It Together?
What comes up for you when you lean into the inquiry, ‘What is holding it together?’ Can you share a personal experience of a time you looked at fractured order through a lens of unity? What helps you see the delicate filigree of life without needing to lock it in explanation? |
| susan schaller wrote: The ink of interrelationship, the magical river called language, connecting us to each other, to things and to those who have been dead for centuries. Yet words are not as full as we can be and are. A… |
| sheetal wrote: We attended funeral of a friend’s mother this morning. It felt like everyone around became aware of their own time coming..sooner or later. As i opened this passage it dawned on me that thread of … |
| aJ wrote: Love, (not “the feeling” but “the decision” … The God, Who ISLove), holds everything together. Hate, the exact opposite of Love, tears apart … destroys … seeks to intimid… |
| David Doane wrote: What is holding it all together is a force more than material reality, beyond time and space, beyond quantum reality. It is a force that is eternal and infinite, with no beginning and no end. It is a … |
| Jagdish P Dave wrote: According to my understanding inquiry made with an open mind and an open heart holds different forms of life including nature together. In such togethernessall man-made boundaries melt away and we rea… |
| Amen wrote: In Love’s realm there are no words … just understanding! Keep placing your comforting hands on people’s shoulders. (I find comfort in reading your words)! … |
| Amen wrote: So beautifully written! Thank you for blessing my silence! A… |
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