I Want to Make Everything I’ve Received Flow Again

There’s a communal nature to wisdom. Our journeys overlap — sometimes in physical life, and sometimes outside of it — words and presence across time and space.

It happened twice on my way home from school drop-off. An On Being interview tugged presciently at the corners of my heart and magnetized my attention. Spoken words, so familiar they could have been my own, floated across time and space on a cosmic wind in a moment my being was permeable and attuned. The presence in those voices was water for a thirsty heart.

An inkling was forming in me. The first sprout of an unconventional intuition was barely perceptible. Without someone to nurture this tiny emergence, I don’t think it would have taken root. It was so vulnerable to the elements of conventionality poised to choke it out, like seeds in rocky soil.

I’m not sure if John O’Donohue and Eugene Peterson ever connected during their time on Earth, but their fragrances converged in me during that season. They became my friends over time and space.

I made my way to their written words, too.

I ordered used copies of decades-old Eugene Peterson books. His words landed in me with force. Peterson loved language. And although he was a pastor and biblical translator, he seemed adamant that our language need not be overly “spiritualized.”

Peterson spoke the language of his tradition holographically, an outflow of his connection to the Wild.

Peterson helped me see that I am connected to this same Wild — one that calls me to boldness and creativity, a willingness to go against the grain, poetically — to sing the things I see.

As I reflect now, I feel warmth and gratitude as I imagine him sitting on a porch with a yellow legal pad, writing words I experienced years later as a homecoming, a mirror.

Experiencing John O’Donohue’s utter taken-ness with the loveliness of language, nature, music, friendship, the soul, and the divine heart was like inhaling second-hand aliveness, and it made me want to be taken, too.

O’Donohue’s literal voice, his Irish accent, and gentle, poetic surety wooed me into under-explored places within me. His way of speaking about time — a rare pairing of unhurried spaciousness and pregnant exigency — was a needle I aimed to thread already, but his presence deepened my felt sense of it.

O’Donohue’s words were familiar enough to spark immediate resonance, and they continued to work in me enigmatically (time-release wisdom) and enzymatically (dissolving polarities). There’s an invitational quality to John’s work — not a hint of moralism in it.

It’s clear to me that John was tapped into the same Wild. John playfully dared me to trust the landscape, to paint the landscape he didn’t finish during his time on Earth.

I’m not the only one with stories of doors opening in time, of presence calling and intermingling with what’s already familiar.

The lyrics of the Indigo Girls song Virginia Woolf have long stirred a sense I’ve had that we call to each other in ways that transcend time.

And here's a young girl
On a kind of a telephone line through time
And the voice at the other end comes like a long lost friend
So we know we're alright
Though life will come and life will go
Still you'll feel it's all right
Someone gets your soul

Woolf’s words were a mirror for songwriter Emily Saliers. This song was Saliers’ reply to Woolf from the chronological future.

And so it was for you
When the river eclipsed your life
And sent your soul like a message in a bottle to me
And it was my rebirth
If you need to know that you weathered the storm
Of cruel mortality
A hundred years later I'm sitting here living proof

There’s a communal nature to wisdom. Our journeys overlap — sometimes in physical life, and sometimes outside of it — words and presence across time and space.

It has been tempting for me to elevate those I admire — to consider them bearers of wisdom and myself a receiver. They, the perennial teachers, me, ever the student.

I recognize now that the same creative force that flowed through my teachers flows through me. Each in their particular way, they “made all they had received flow again.”*

I am a drop in the ocean, but I am not a separate, individual drop. In me, and in you, this oceanic current flows and uniquely incarnates.

I want to make everything I’ve received flow again.

I’m Curious…

Whose lives/words/art has called to you over time and space?
What has their work stirred in you?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

P.S. John and Eugene, thank you. Your lives and your words have nourished me. May you also be nourished.

* “I am one with the source insofar as I, too, act as a source by making everything I have received flow again.” - Raimon Panikkar - a quote that Cynthia Bourgeault brought to my attention