Teasing Out the Whole Story: Spiritual Reality

Nature Notes - November 2024

Objects, places, and even people are much more than their physical characteristics – they are a sum of our reactions to them and the meaning they have for us, and a sum of experiencing things as a whole.​

- by James Inabinet

For quite some time I’ve been trying to tease out the story of my home place, La Terre. My notion of home has long been more than just the property I live on, the house I live in. The surrounding landscape that makes my home viable, animated, real is also home to me, extending perhaps from New Orleans to Mobile and as far north as Hattiesburg. 

Nature Notes
is supported by

With these established boundaries and an inquisitive mind, my task would seem simple. I used to think that it was, confounded as I was by the spell of surface appearance that says “what I see unfolding is all there is–there’s nothing more.” While surface appearance tells a true story, it doesn’t tell the whole story. I want the whole story.
  
I have found that the “whole story” is about more than just physical reality. Physical reality is easy; we see it, feel it, hear it. Everywhere we look things happen, eliciting narratives based on observations of true events, witnessed, recorded, remembered, told. I used to believe that these stories and their kind told the entire story of my home place. I now know that what they leave out, what they disregard, is the best part of the story, that of spiritual reality.
​

 
Spiritual reality underlies and interpenetrates physical reality. There, ubiquitous, active, dancing energy patterns are subtle, invisible ghosts that impart meaning. To gain access requires more than looking at; it requires relationship. In practice, this means that the objective observer, that sterile witness ineluctably separated from what she sees, must stay home, to be replaced by a soul that’s willing to mingle, go over to, become one with. In the face of the Other, through sympathy, such a soul energetically shapeshifts to intimately interact with the Other. So engaged, this gregarious soul effectively “looks through” surface reality and mere physical appearance to peer into the depths, into the inside of the Other. It’s not so much a “seeing through” as a “feeling through.” This “Other” could be another human, another being; it could be river, wind, sky, or the place itself.
 

Spiritual reality is like the Navajo’s Beauty: nature’s essential order and creative acts. Like spiritual energy, Beauty pervades physical reality even as it shares in its essence, giving it a “patina of blessing” that can be felt but not seen. Beauty is ever moving, never lingering long, coalescing here, dissipating over there, reappearing again, enkindling, breathing through. Because of its profound subtlety, it requires metaphor to even talk about. Though ubiquitous, it withers in the absence of continual restoration. Humans somehow stand in the gap between Beauty’s dissipation and creation and can restore it by simply noticing, recognizing, attending-to. Like spiritual reality, this requires relationship. In relationship, knowing is usually more a feeling than thinking thing. When a soul is engaged in relationship of this kind, the human vibration resonates with that of Beauty in whatever guise it physically appears: tree, stone, lover, beloved coffee house, accompanied by a blissful feeling of pure meaning. The historian Bernard Berenson calls this “itness”:

It was a morning in early summer. A silver haze shimmered and trembled over the lime trees. The air was laden with their fragrance. The temperature was like a caress. I remember – I need not recall – that I climbed up a tree stump and felt suddenly immersed in Itness. I did not call it by that name. I had no need for words. It and I were one.
​

 
Spiritual reality, again, is the locus of meaning. Meaning bestows purpose and value. In Berenson’s anecdote, everything about the moment oozes with meaning. Is Berenson the sole provider of meaning here? Current notions about meaning have chauvinistically placed meaning-making solely in the hands of humans, as in: “what does it mean to me?” If that’s so, where does that leave the rest of the world – meaningless? It’s no wonder our lives seem insipid, meaningless.
 

Berenson’s experience was anything but insipid or meaningless. What made that excess of meaning so powerful? Berenson certainly caught the meaning even if he couldn’t say what it was. I don’t think the meaning was from Berenson, or the stump, the sun, the fragrance, the temperature, but in the relationship between them all. It’s a gestalt; there’s essentially nothing until there’s everything. In this way, Berenson was able to share in the meaning to be had in that pregnant moment of numinous potentiality. Without Berenson’s willingness to open himself to the vivifying spiritual reality to be had in the moment, his account would have been something like: “It was a hazy morning in early summer. I sat near the lime trees on a stump. The end.” Though this would have been a true accounting, it’s not the whole story. Berenson’s actual account shows us the rest of the story.
​

---

Enjoy this feature?