If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence
George Eliot ~ Middlemarch
I write to stay connected to the sound of my ‘creature heart’ – to the soaring, howling, beating, roaring, trickling, grass-growing, thoroughly ordinary experience of being alive.
It’s not easy right now. The intimacy of our experience is in danger of being drowned out. We are increasingly mesmerised by the voices of a small number of grand players hogging the stage in an unscripted world drama. Everything and everyone in view seems larger than life, as though we mere humans – wriggling helplessly like fish caught on the hook of world news – are watching Titans battling it out above our heads. Against this backdrop it’s easy to discard the ‘ordinary human life’ as irrelevant, puny, indistinguishable.
We underestimate ourselves. We lose lose sight of the extraordinary richness of our own human ecology – the depth, breadth and height of experience which lies within us and between us. We become ‘flat’ like our screens, two dimensional.
I suffer this asset stripping of my soul, ‘there’s a howl in me’ (The Cage) – a torn, shredded, paw-trapped, dried-up-river, cage of thorns in me. And I sense that this howl is both personal and collective. I could tame this, I could ‘make it alright mummy’ (Faded). I could – but I won’t. I won’t because somewhere in me I know that this wild creature heart is the tap-root of my being, the thread which will guide me back to the roar which lies on the other side of silence.
Open to the sound of this roar we are all great souls and the Titans will quake.