25 Words for 2025
There is the practice of choosing a word for the year ahead. Some people find it to be profound and centring, others, not so much. As for me, I think this year in particular, one word is just not enough. I’m jotting down 25 words for 2025 in this post because I want to be flexible in the year ahead. I want choice, I want it all. As well, I don’t need to tell you about the state of the world. The unspeakable things humans are doing to other humans, the fires (literal and figurative), the atrocities. The atrocities.
More than ever we need to be angels for each other. I don’t know what your capacities are, your griefs, your nervous conditions, your financial states, your health conditions. I don’t know how your soul fares. But I know that rarely does anyone exist without trial.
I think that words have the potential to help. I believe that your words are wings. I believe in conversation and collaboration and that we can make things a little bit better for each other. I believe in the power of our three meters of influence. I believe that when we strive to create good conditions for ourselves and others to dwell in, we have a better chance of thriving. So, let’s begin.
But first, Virginia Woolf.
The only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf begins: “Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations – naturally. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today – that they are so stored with meanings, with memories, that they have contracted so many famous marriages.”
The full transcripts can be found here and fully worth listening to in its entirety — you will forever think of the word “incarnadine” in Woolf’s voice.
“The splendid word “incarnadine,” for example – who can use it without remembering also “multitudinous seas”? In the old days, of course, when English was a new language, writers could invent new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words – they spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation – but we cannot use them because the language is old. You cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but part of other words. It is not a word indeed until it is part of a sentence.”
1. Collaborate
I take this word “collaborate” from the similarly named chapter in What’s the Story by Anne Bogart which is pretty much a holy book for me. We’re not always in the position to collaborate or so it feels — especially for a solitary writer-type such as myself who has spent her entire life guarding that solitude so fiercely! But one of my goals this coming year is to find a way to get there. Anne Bogart says that you might imagine being in “collaboration with your own brain,” so in a pinch that will do — read across disciplines, think across disciplines, reach out to others outside your niche or silo. Collaboration can be tricky, scary, risky. She says, “collaboration requires generosity, openness, a sense of adventure, a love of active culture, tenacity, truth telling, interest in others, decisiveness and willingness, at any moment, to give up an attachment to the final result.”
She also says that to collaborate (and she speaks as a theatre director, a leader), “one needs a strong core and a supple and flexible exterior. This next part is perhaps the most important thing I’ve read and attempted to internalize of late:
“The Taoists say, “Be round on the outside and square on the inside,” which means be generous, respectful and civil on the outside but on the inside know exactly what you think and feel at all times.”
She advises that in collaboration, one must give up trying to control in “superficial ways.” In terms of being a director, you’re not strong when you’re “territorial and inflexible.” Relinquishing is an art form too.
What will collaboration give you? William James (via AB) says, “Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.” THIS is where you will make creative breakthroughs — and collaboration can be a shortcut to shaking up your thinking.
An interesting exercise I’ve found is to see what a song, a poem, a painting might say to each other when you look at them side by side.
“Be round on the outside and square on the inside”
2. Civility
The Soul of Civility by Alexandra Hudson was the perfect book for my end of year reading. I talked about it in an earlier post and since then, I keep picking it up and underlining more things. It holds a lot of wisdom but I keep coming back to her saying that civility is “a disposition of the heart.” She asks, “how to be civil in an uncivil world?” And gives some answers: “choose to be unoffendable,” “cultivate social resilience,” have a “robust appreciation of the dignity of the human person.” She reminds us that “We can never know with complete certainty the sate of someone’s soul or character.”
Hudson tells us: “Politeness is easy. Civility requires effort.” Civility never silences she says, but “seeks to listen and learn.” Civility can be tricky and difficult and it’s deeper than politeness. It’s rooted in empathy and the dignity of others.
3. Belonging
In Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly, she says, “Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.”
From “The Paradox of Belonging” on American Libraries site with Brené Brown:
“You are only free when you realize you belong no place—you belong every place—no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great,” Angelou told Bill Moyers in a 1973 interview.
Brown interpreted: “We confuse belonging with fitting in, but the truth is that belonging is just in our heart, and when we belong to ourselves and believe in ourselves above all else, we belong everywhere and nowhere.”
If, as Joseph Campbell says, “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are,” then what are our obligations to make sure everyone has this same possibility?
4. Xenia
I recently wrote a post about Homer’s The Odyssey and the new Emily Wilson translation. The two rules of Xenia, via Wikipedia are:
The respect from hosts to guests. Hosts must be hospitable to guests and provide them with a bath, food, drink, gifts, and safe escort to their next destination. It is considered rude to ask guests questions, or even to ask who they are, before they have finished the meal provided to them.
The respect from guests to hosts. Guests must be courteous to their hosts and not be a threat or burden. Guests are expected to provide stories and news from the outside world. Most importantly, guests are expected to reciprocate if their hosts ever call upon them in their homes”
It was when I started looking into the subject of xenia that I discovered Alexandra Hudson’s work on civility, and I like what she says about justice and beneficence, civility and hospitality:
“I’ve been reflecting on how the dichotomy of justice and beneficence relate to Xenia, civility, and hospitality. I’ve been trying to devise a framework for how to think about our obligations to one another as human beings—the bare minimum being justice, not actively harming others, the above-and-beyond being beautiful acts of generosity, such as sharing your last bit of food and wine with a complete stranger. Both obligations derive from the need to respect the humanity and dignity of the other—which again, is how I conceive and define civility.”
How to be more hospitable? What are our obligations?
5. Imagination
A book that has meant a lot to me these last few years is Emergent Strategy by adrienne marie brown. She says, “Change is coming — what do we need to imagine as we prepare for it?” (Bit of an evergreen question, there right?). She asks such GOOD questions: “How do we experience our beauty and humanity in every condition?” Yes, we need to at bare minimum find our pockets of beauty and joy, but what if we could find a way to experience the beauty of our very humanity in every condition and setting? I think about this a bit like the buddhist teaching of how it’s easy to be a buddhist at the top of a mountain, but the real test is when you come down to where the people are and practice your practice among them.
Our imaginations are the most powerful thing. And, a.m.b. says, “We are in an imagination battle.” It can be such an amazing tool, our imaginations, but also, it “gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of capability.” She references the deaths (too abundant) of black people who are dead because in “some white imagination, they were dangerous.” In Canada, we can also remember the too frequent injustices and deaths of indigenous people, and we can expand this out into the world and to recent atrocities and genocides. So how do we imagine new worlds for all of us? We can practice our futures, we can time travel. “It is our right and responsibility to create a new world.”
brown quotes Ursula Le Guin, “It’s up to authors to spark the imagination of their readers and to help them envision alternatives to how we live.”
This is not just for authors to do though. Anyone can take it upon themselves to spark the imagination of those in our 3 meters of influence. It’s a way of changing the channel too, if we’re prone to complaining about the same old same old. Yes, it all seems inadequate, but doing nothing is infinitely worse.
Other questions that brown asks that spark our imaginations: “How are we resilient during apocalypse?” “What is our most compelling future?” She offers an invitation that reminds us, “let’s keep learning, growing, and evolving together.” She says, “Let’s make the future compelling.”
It’s almost impossible right now given the current political climate, not to look at the future with an eye to doom. But what if we were too look at the future in our immediate vicinity and see it as compelling? How might this change the way we move forward?
6. Integrity
Let’s also remember these words by adrienne marie brown: “How we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale. The patterns of the universe repeat at scale.” How we treat one person is how we treat all people. So, it makes sense that we need to work on our own wholeness and integrity first — our behaviour toward others comes from that. In the Martha Beck book on Integrity, she says, “Integrity is the cure for unhappiness. Period.” She points out that the word integrity “has taken on a slightly prim, judgemental nuance in modern English, but the word comes from the Latin integer, meaning “intact.”
Beck talks about the experience of “unity of intention, fascination, and purpose” and “joyfully doing what feels truest in each moment.” She admits that many feel like living this kind of “fulfilling life” is implausible or impossible. She hopes for us all to be in “complete alignment of body, mind, heart, and soul.” Beck says that “at the deepest level, you know what makes you happy and how to create your best possible life.” However, (ohhh, that word however…am right?) However, we often ignore our “genuine feelings” to “please our cultures.” (Which might be work culture, social culture, family culture etc). I think if we can help ourselves and then help others find alignment in our everyday life, we’ll have done something.
“By choosing integrity, I become more whole, but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means becoming more real by acknowledging the whole of who I am.” This is Parker J. Palmer. In his book, "On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old,” he talks about how important it is to “show up as our true selves as often as we can while we have life.” You’ve got to get “fierce with reality.” There are no shortcuts, he says. “The only way to become whole is to put our arms lovingly around everything we know ourselves to be: self-serving and generous, spiteful and compassionate, cowardly and courageous, treacherous and trustworthy. We must be able to say to ourselves and to the world at large, “I am all of the above.””
7. Emergence
Emergence, according to adrienne marie brown (you should really buy her book, just saying) is: “the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.” Emergence, she says, “notices the way small actions and connections create complex systems.”
In an interview on On Being, she says, “…the definition I work with comes from Nick Obolensky. And its emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of relatively simple interactions. So birds flapping their wings, birds in a flock together, is a relatively simple interaction; but birds all doing that together and avoiding predation can become the most complex, gorgeous patterns of murmurations, migration, survival. So we’re all emergent beings — humans are an emergent species amongst emergent species. And the strategy part comes in — I was in a movement moment where everyone was talking about who was strategic: who’s the most strategic, and who’s creating a strategic plan, and all of this. And I realized that there was no specificity. You could be strategic and still be causing a lot of harm.”
In the same interview she makes the point that complaining and opining might be “dodging the actual work of democracy, small-d democracy.”
Her own mentor, Grace Lee Boggs, taught brown to “keep listening, and learning and having conversations. She said, “Transform yourself to transform the world.” She recommended waging love. Small acts are meaningful. Small acts together can transform the world.
8. Elegance
Elegance is something I think about a lot, strangely. What is it to be elegant? How can it transform how we live when we aspire to elegance?
I’ve written about elegance a lot — it crops up here where I said:
Brown quotes Gibrán Rivera, who asks, “What is the next most elegant step?” And she says that “an elegant step is one that acknowledges what is known and unknown, and what the capacity of this group actually is. An elegant step allows humility, allows people to say “Actually we need to do some research” or “Actually we need to talk to some folks not in this room” etc.
The Hafiz poem, I’m sure you know:
Elegance
It
is not easy
to stop thinking ill
of others.
Usually one must enter into a friendship
with a person
Who has accomplished that great feat himself.
Then
Something might start to rub off on you
of that
True
Elegance.
*
I’m not the first person to use the word “rebelegance” but I’m here for it.
9. Comedy
When in your personal life, things get absurd, it’s useful to remember what Joseph Campbell said: “As you proceed through life, following your own path, birds will shit on you. Don’t bother to brush it off.” He also said, “Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance. Having a sense of humour saves you.”
When very little else has worked for me in terms of keeping my mental health from sinking, the reminder to back up and look at things from a comedic distance, with a comedic view has helped.
“Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance. Having a sense of humour saves you.”
10. Repair
I’ve written quite a number of posts on the subject of “repair” and am working through these ideas in book form, too. One of the posts began with a quotation by Haruki Murakami, that I still think about a lot. He says, “But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.” And in a book I love there is another line that speaks to me: Lovability by Emily Kendal Frey.
“That I would be responsible for saving myself still lands in the pile of Great Indignities.”
In Index Cards by Moyra Davey, she reminds herself:
“Write to Jane:
We are all trying to fix something.”
I suppose my thinking around repair is quite small — I’m focusing on my usual 3 meters of influence. What can I repair in my own limited sphere? What happens if I just quietly and without fanfare fix those small things that I can fix? What are the reverberations, then?
11. Dream
Dreaming is another popular TwB subject.
There’s a lot I want to say about dreaming in 2025 but maybe this Springsteen video says it all for me.
And then there is this version which always gives me chills.
I feel like we’re now in an era where it’s hard to dream. So much is being taken away from us. We have to feed our subconscious with good books, good pictures, movies, conversations, laughter, joy. We need to dream. Don’t stop dreaming.
12. Love
“There is no force in the world but love, and when you carry it within you, if you simply have it, even if you remain baffled as to how to use it, it will work its radiant effects and help you out of and beyond yourself: one must never lose this belief, one must simply (and if it were nothing else) endure in it!”
— Rilke
In a recent Mixtape post, I shared the Steve Winwood song, “Higher Love” and some words by Hermann Hesse:
“To cut through the charades of this world, to despise it, may be the aim of the great thinkers. My only goal in life is to be able to love this world, to see it and myself and all beings with the eyes of love and admiration and reverence…”
How difficult to love this world! How easy!
13. Shine
Sometimes you just get a song stuck in your head for a whole year. This is one of them, Shine by David Gray:
“Remember your soul is the one thing you can't compromise
Take my hand
we're gonna go where we can shine”
I dedicate this next year to being, to going, where I can shine. Failing that, to shine where I am. And not compromise.
14. Conversation
What I Mean To Say by Ian Williams is probably one of the most important books I read in 2024. I talked about it in this post where I said:
Williams talks about conversations as being “architectural.” He says, “There’s a balance of speaking and listening, of enthusiasm, of goodwill, intent, of power…” He also talks about conversations through the language of music which I love. His thesis, he says, is: “We can talk about anything if we know how.” and “I think tone is everything.” He emphasizes that “we need to listen to each other.” “We should listen to people as if they were dying.”
I asked, Can conversations repair? And I want to continue thinking about this question throughout the coming year. Better, I want to have conversations and see what happens. Williams says, “Good conversations are not just about transmitting information. They’re a call to live in a responsive state of being.” He says that when we accept the invitation to be in this state, “the world talks back to us.” And, “The energy of conversation then reverberates through our environment, relationships, and communities.”
15. Sonder
I came upon the “made-up” word Sonder in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig and wrote about it here. I think by now the word is real! Koenig defines it thus:
n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
As long as I have been blogging I have been sharing the following by Rilke:
“Do not believe that the person who is trying to offer you solace lives his life effortlessly among the simple and quiet words that might occasionally comfort you. His life is filled with much hardship and sadness, and it remains far behind yours. But if it were otherwise, he could never have found these words.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
16. Enthusiasm
“Hell is life drying up.” Joseph Campbell
We have to remember to live! This sounds so obvious. It is! But it’s also easy to get caught up in the dailiness of life, the unrest of the world, the gossip, the drudgery. For those of us who have struggled with the black dog, with burnout, with exhaustion, and disillusionment, it’s hard to do anything but keep your head above water at times. I do think that the antidote to much is to commit to the bit we call enthusiasm.
How? Try and be around those who are also enthusiastic or who at least wish to be. Enthusiasm is incredibly contagious and for that we can be thankful.
Rumi:
“Look carefully around you and recognize
the luminosity of souls. Sit beside those
who draw you to that.”
Do everything you can to rekindle your enthusiasm! Live! Be alive. Go to the light. Be present! We really are born to be alive.
17. Seeing
As someone who has spent most of her life writing about visual art, emotionally supporting a visual artist ie. my partner, raising a daughter who works in animation, and then practicing photography myself, thinking about seeing is very prevalent for me.
“To learn to see — to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it: to defer judgement, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
I’ve talked about the apple test here before in a post about seeing which I ended by asking a bunch of questions:
Is our job seeing? Is it seeing how others see? How do you as an artist see? How is your seeing unique? What are the limitations and constraints? How could you see better? What is your relationship with clarity? with blur? What is your night vision like? Your day vision? How will you get others to see what you see or want them to see? How do you leave room for others to see?
I quoted W.J.T. Mitchell in the post who said:
“In an age of “all-pervasive image-making, we still do not know exactly what pictures are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on the observers and on the world, how their history is to be understood, and what is to be done with or about them.”
Even though most of us spend all day looking at things, our increased time spent in a digital space, phones, computers, etc, we still don’t have a grip on how all this affects our brains, or our ability to see with intent and acuteness and depth.
It’s interesting to think about what Janet Malcolm first noted as the “optical unconscious.” She says, “It is through photography that we first discover the existence of the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.” With the prevalence of crappy gen AI images, photographers might be more inclined to leave in or consciously frame things with an eye to the odd backgrounds. They say things! I know I’ve been framing things a little bit differently — not waiting for people in the background to move out of the composition, or re-adjusting so a sign or piece of rubbish is outside the frame. I’m more inclined to leave these things in.
Let’s not forget the words of Rilke: “To look at something is such a wonderful thing of which we know so little.”
18. Soul
Soul is a word I come back to time and again on Transactions with Beauty.
Wake Up
by Adam Zagajewski
Wake up, my soul.
I don’t know where you are,
where you’re hiding,
but wake up, please,
we’re still together,
the road is still before us,
a bright strip of dawn
will be our star.
*
From a post titled, Calm and Beauty and the Seeing Soul:
Poets are told to stay away from the word, even: soul. Which is why I was drawn to the words of Rumi, via Coleman Barks so thoroughly when I found them. Barks has written a commentary on the work of Rumi’s father, Bahauddin. He remarks on Bahauddin’s line, “If life troubles dry you out…” saying, “I take this to mean if situations you live through reduce the charge of your current, the juicy verve of responsive awareness, then you should consider those as dangerous to your soul.”
I hope you can hold on to your juicy verve of awareness.
19. Resonance
My ‘dead week’ read found me at the perfect time: The Art of Resonance by Anne Bogart. I’m not sure why I haven’t read this book before now? Though I can only surmise the universe planned it this way as it’s exactly what I needed.
“Our job as artists is to become consciously resonant to the world rather than alienated from it; to connect with others and to create the conditions for resonance among us,” says Bogart. And, “…we create the circumstances in which resonance will occur.” She speaks from her position as a theatre director, but I’ve always found most of what she says will apply to the writing life, and also to my library worker life. How are we creating conditions? for ourselves, for others? Because once those conditions are met, THEN the magic can occur. “Resonance,” she says, “is not only an intellectual idea, it is also an embodied experience, involving perception, sensation, cognitive function, imagination, and feeling.”
She talks about how when in rehearsal a space will build up a resonance; vibrations will accrue. And isn’t that like any work place? I feel it at the library, in my partner’s painting studio, and in my writing study. The air will thicken in all sorts of ways. Maybe that sounds a bit out there to some, but if you’ve worked in a place for 13 years in a public space for example, as I once did, you know how that feels and how it translates into your very being, your actions, your abilities, your heart. When you don’t have that, when I don’t have that, I feel unmoored, less than, thin on the ground.
Anyway, as I said, Bogart’s a director, the boss. She says her job “is to awaken resonant channels to others. But I must begin by creating the conditions for resonance in myself. To begin with, I must be open to being affected, to being influenced. How am I being with others? How am I listening? How am I inviting resonance?”
How can we open ourselves to be part of this great resonance and to be a part of creating the necessary conditions so that we may come out of these spaces, as Bogart says, “better tuned?” Which is to say, feeling as though we’re in alignment, and part of something meaningful.
20. Story
Anne Bogart says, “The human impulse to tell one’s own story is one of the basic human rights and freedoms in democratic societies.” She also says, “Speaking a story can be an act of letting in light.”
In Anne Bogart’s What’s the Story she says, “I believe that how I describe my life matters not only to my own experience but also to the experiences of others.”
In a post from this past year, I asked artists to consider what their art story is and wrote about the importance of telling it:
Humans are natural storytellers, we connect through stories. This isn’t news. But I think we often hide from our stories, or don’t bring them forward in clear ways. I like to give myself permission to do this by remembering Bogart saying, “Speaking a story can be an act of letting in light.” And to remember too that telling our story is a basic human right, as she also notes. She quotes the filmmaker Sarah Polley, “Telling stories is our way of coping, a way out of creating shape out of a mess. It binds everyone together.”
Exercising our intellectual freedom and our rights to our stories and to access stories has never been more important.
21. Trust
When we trust people, we give dignity. Again, that wise woman, adrienne marie brown:
“Trust the people. (If you trust the people, they become trustworthy). Move at the speed of trust.”
It feels controversial to ask anyone to trust, well, anything! these days. But if you can remember to trust the people in your vicinity, your three meters, I think you might be pleasantly surprised. Start with small things. I have been running an experiment for most of my working life. When I worked in a university science library in my undergrad days (my good old five year degree) it was in circulation and reserve. Hard to imagine these days but students had hardcopy readings filed in folders that they could check out for 2 hours at a time. For some reason they very often forgot their library cards. These readings felt like life or death to them and often there were tears when they couldn’t check out because of the lack of a card. One day fairly early on I decided, no guts no glory, and I just started checking out these readings on my own card for them. (There were not insubstantial fines if the item went missing). It was a way of breaking the hardcore rules without breaking the rules. It probably happened once a shift and I was never once burned. This was pre-automation so no one was wondering why an English major had so many science lab readings checked out on her card. I would tell the person what I was doing, and let them know I trusted them. They came through for me.
I’ve never really quit doing this experiment. When someone wants the use of a pen, I let them know I trust them to bring it back. I have faith in you! I’ll say. Invariably, the person will want to return this 20 cent pen to me specifically. In the end, this action is more for me than anything — my faith in humanity is renewed in these small moments. It helps me have faith in other interactions then, to go into them more wholeheartedly. Trust resonates.
22. Joy
Being alive! We really were born to be alive, right? How to be more joyful? Play, I think, is central to that. Do one fun thing every day. Do one joyful thing. Make that part of what you’re doing anyway: “What you have to do, you do with play,” said Joseph Campbell.
He also said: “Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.”
“Where do I feel good? What is giving me joy?” Another good big/small question by Campbell.
Way back when on Twitter, I followed the Library Owl who said: “genuinely joyful people are often not taken seriously, but there are few things harder or braver than hanging onto your delight and awe amid the flaming furnace of the world’s horrors. a truly joyful person has a soul made of steel.”
No such thing as too much joy:
Rilke: “There is really no more beautiful way of putting one’s own life force to the test than by recognizing and seizing joy itself, without exaggeration but purely with the strength of joy, and to grasp with its proper measure the perfection and loveliness of a few days without even the least sense of a ‘too much.’”
And in a passage from a Barbara Kingsolver essay:
“In my own worst seasons I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again.”
― Barbara Kingsolver from High Tide in Tucson
I love the idea that it is the geranium, a “single glorious thing” that teaches joy.
You can’t talk about joy these days and not reference Ross Gay’s books. In Inciting Joy, he talks about joy needing sorrow. He says, “If it sounds like I’m advocating for sorrow, nope.” He goes on, “Besides sorrow (unlike joy, apparently) doesn’t need an advocate.” He says, “I think sorrow’s gonna be just fine.” If you’ve not had the joy of reading The Book of Delights, please start there. And if you need a couple of songs to read by, try Jon Batiste’s amazing Ode to Joyful, and Joy Revolution by Raye Zaragoza.
Want to be more human? Feel more joy. Rilke: “Joy is inexpressibly more than happiness. Happiness befalls poeple, happiness is fate, while people cause joy to bloom inside themselves. Joy is plainly a good season for the heart; joy is the ultimate achievement of which human beings are capable.”
23. Poetry
John O’Donohue notes that “true poetic beauty emerges when the poet is absolutely faithful to the uniqueness of her own voice. Beauty holds faith with the deepest signature of individuality; it graces the passion of individuality when it risks itself beyond its own frontiers, out to where the depth of the abyss calls.”
Poetry seems to me to be the most important art form these days as it can respond with immediacy to the news of the world. We all know the famous lines by William Carlos Williams:
“It is difficult / to get the news from poems / Yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”
Some would argue that “poetry is useless as evidence.” When Anthony Wilson began posting his Palestine Advent Calendar it felt utterly useful to me.
I’ve written a lot of posts about poetry, but not, I think enough. One of my earliest posts is still one that is very often clicked on. “Transcendence — On Reading Poetry.”
In the post, I quote Joseph Campbell who says in Thou Art That — that poetry is a possible path toward transcendence:
“How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually.”
Like Adam Zagajewski in the next quotation, I have to insist that poetry has power. I don’t need proof or statistics either:
“Don’t we use the word poetry in two ways? One: as a part of literature. Two: as a tiny part of the world, both human and pre-human, the part of beauty. So poetry as literature, as language, discovers within the world a layer that has existed unobserved in reality, and by doing so changes something in our life, expands somewhat the space of what we are. So yes, it has the power to restore the mutilated world, even if no statistics ever show it.”
24. Authentic
In his notebooks, Albert Camus said, “But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.”
Brené Brown has done a lot of work on authenticity. She says, “Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It's about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.” (From The Gifts of Imperfection).
Moyra Davey in Index Cards quotes the German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder:
“I’d say the more ‘honestly’ you put yourself into the story, the more that story will concern others as well.”
Davey also makes a note for herself, “No more clean, happy, tidy making of things.”
From my post for artists considering their art story, I wrote this:
Advice for proceeding in the creative life? Thomas Merton said this in an essay titled, “Writing as a Spiritual Calling”: “I would say that there is one basic idea that should be kept in mind in all the changes we make in life, whether of career or anything else. We should decide not in view of better pay, higher rank, “getting ahead,” but in view of becoming more real, entering more authentically into direct contact with life, living more as a free and mature human person, able to give myself more to others, able to understand myself and the world better.”
25. Beauty
Recently, I started a new category on my blog, “beauty notes.” I’ve been blogging with an eye to finding beauty in my everyday ordinary life since September of 2016 in this space. Have I made a difference? Has this been useful? And if it has previously, will it be different going forward? Should I continue?
Of course, in the day of the Substack and with AI trolling the internet stealing our words and images, does the public blog even make sense any more? The thing is: I think this space has resonances, vibrations. So many people have landed here over the years and while this isn’t necessarily a comment-heavy blog, I certainly have received a lot of very meaningful notes privately.
In Saving Beauty by Byung-Chul Han, he quotes Heidegger who says that beauty is “the poetic name for being.” He says that “Beauty, as in the advent of truth, is generative, creative, even poetic. It gives something to see. This given gift is beautiful. The work is not beautiful as a product but as the shining through of truth.”
He also says that “the beautiful is what commits us. It founds duration.” The construction of beauty is necessary and resilient. What we long for is “something that commits us, something beyond the ordinary.” He says, the “saving of beauty is the saving of that which commits us.” And we need to hold on, to remember that humans persist, goodness, truth, beauty persist.
One of the books I’ve been dipping into lately is my well-worn copy of Beauty: The Invisible Embrace by John O’Donohue. I need to read this at intervals, and maybe you do too:
“Over against the world with all its turbulence, distraction and worry, one should cultivate a style of mind that can reach through to an inner stillness and calm. The world cannot ruffle the dignity of a soul that dwells in its own tranquillity. Gradually, this serenity will begin to pervade our seeing and change the way we look at things.”
This is the part I usually quote from but there is more. O’Donohue reminds us that if we get stuck or stagnant in our seeing, if it narrows or we let it become predictable, we lose the light that brings colour to life. But when we see anew, we find the light with fresh eyes! He says, “When the soul is alive to beauty, we begin to see life in a fresh and vital way. The old habits of seeing are broken.” It is O’Donohue who has most often reminded me of Blaise Pascal’s words: “In difficult times you should always carry something beautiful in your mind.”
“In difficult times you should always carry something beautiful in your mind.”
To all the artists and creators out there, I remind you of this by Joan Chittester:
“It is Beauty that magnetizes the contemplative, and it is the duty of the contemplative to give beauty away so that the rest of the world may, in the midst of squalor, ugliness, and pain, remember that beauty is possible.”
And I like this, I do, but would amend “give it away” to “share” and to value the monetary worth of your art. Perhaps some of it will be given freely, but you can share it with the world and still be recompensed. Insist upon that. If you don’t have money to eat, it will be difficult to make more art.
Usually at this time of year, I share a video that a good friend of mine, Lee, shared with me years ago. It’s Jennifer Berezan’s “A Song for All Beings.” Not a bad way to ring in a new year.
Thanks for reading this post and contemplating some or all of the words I’ve shared today. Words matter. Words help. Choosing the correct word and creating the right tone has power. The book that really made the end of my year, as I’ve mentioned, is The Art of Resonance by Anne Bogart. She echoes the opening of the post and the Virginia Woolf in the last part of her book. She says, “Each word that we choose resonates with personal meaning.” When we keep our language use fresh, we’re less likely to get stuck. She says, “words have a biochemical effect and the words that we attach to our experiences become our experiences.” When we work at “exchanging words and syntax or sentence structure” we “can also alter how we think, move and interact with the world.” If you want to change your patterns, examine the words you use.
If you’ve made it this far, then you might like to pop over to my Ko-fi page and consider supporting Transactions with Beauty in the upcoming year. Yes, this is a labour of love, and I value that I can offer it for free. But honestly, last year was rough and so if you found last year’s reading of TwB equivalent to what you might purchase a novel for….there is a button for that :) Thanks in advance.
