Today I will invite you over and give you the best I have to offer. Imagine arriving to a kitchen spread of all my favourite foods, my all-time momentous tunes on the playlist, the house cleaned to perfection and Long Island iced teas served by an intriguingly handsome yet shy bartender. Today's written offering will be the poetic equivalent of all the above. I am going to invite you to sit on my virtual picnic blanket, lay back and breathe in these words and images. Taken from T.S Eliot's fourth Quartet, "Little Gidding", I am not exaggerating when I say these words have stopped me in my life tracks on numerous occasions and changed everything.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Just take a moment and reread that. So much to wrap ourselves up in. Firstly, I love that Eliot says 'We'. This isn't a solo journey; it shows an awareness that souls belong in jigsaw groups. How would Eliot have felt knowing that blogs would exist one day to bring remote jigsaw pieces to their table? This first line is one I would happily have painted over our front door, or tattooed on my children's foreheads I believe in it so deliciously. Exploration doesn't have to mean strapping on your backpack and packing a lunch, it can be sitting in the same armchair but delving into every feeling, chasing every thread of a thought to uncover new ideas. It can mean exploring other people, really trying to understand that even the people we live with experience this life in a completely different way to us.
It's a warming idea that the end of our exploration will bring us to where we began, a circle. Some would say frustrating, but there is a comfort, almost an excitement to thinking that we may already have come very close to where we will end up. Imagine asking searching questions as a teenager whilst sat on a windswept beach; questions that we ache to understand but feel too small to even begin. Returning to that beach on a deckchair with our grandchildren, years later, we may feel those questions in the salty air or wedged between the pebbles and smile as we realise they were the wrong ones to ask but they led us down the path we took. Knowing the place for the first time suggests that either we didn't really know it as a teenager or that we don't recognise it as a grandparent. Or it suggests that with our memories and experiences in our exploration albums, everything makes a new sense.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
So gorgeous to think of something being 'unknown' but 'remembered'. Again, Eliot touches on the idea of the parallel self. Is that what feelings of deja vu really are? A prosaic but nonetheless important question. In those quiet moments when we feel something that is both foreign but comfortable, are we not brushing close to what we might have been? Or what actually is being elsewhere? There are lovely notions of time, as well as place woven in here too: the start of the river being present in the waterfall at the end - speaking to us, just like the children in the apple tree. The obvious reference to Eden blossoms the thought out to notions of wisdom in our choices. Are we making the right decisions? Are we being the right person? I have no idea how to answer these fabulous questions but I do always remember to listen for wisdom in the stillness between the waves.
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