Before I start… If you’re receiving this as a new subscriber to RedLands, welcome, and thank you for subscribing. You might like to start with this post which explains a bit more about who I am, and about RedLands.
At the end of this post there’s details about some other offerings soon to be here on RedLands, like a writing/coaching corner, and real-time updates on the book I’m working on. There’s a good song there, too.
Hello, unseen but greatly-appreciated reader. How are you? Or — as I think a poet once asked — how is your heart? What does it know, which you might never have proof of?
I saw a snippet from an interview with the late poet Mary Oliver recently. In it, she was asked about the questions she poses in her work. She said that so many of us spend our lives seeking the answerable, and bypassing the things that can’t be answered and in doing so, we leave little space for the pleasure of mystery. She encourages a gladness in that mystery, and not to want answers all the time. Often easier said than lived.
It got me thinking about the unseen, and about knowing, and what we give weight to in this world, and about hidden beauty — like DNA; a life-giving structure made of two strands that twist around each other to form a double helix, each strand made of just four molecules — adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T). A particular combination of these letters makes a gene, and it is genes that give life instructions for how to form, how to function, how to be. There is so much in this elegant twist of life, so much created from those four ‘letters’. Those letters — in conjunction with environment — produce behaviour and sound, art and space travel, empathy and questions, talents and illnesses, dreams and death and life.
And it’s hidden. We can’t see it with our eyes, we can only see its effects. A bit like dark matter — a form of matter that doesn’t interact with light and emits no energy. It is known to exist only by its interaction with gravity and its effect on visible objects. Microscopes and telescopes aid our understanding these days, but we felt or experienced or suspected these things before we ever saw them, before we had proof.
I thought of this recently on Valentine’s Day, which this year fell on Ash Wednesday — a day that points to fragility and mortality and marks the first day of Lent; a day when traditionally ashes are placed on forehead or hand, with the remembrance that “you are dust, and to dust you shall return”. It was a day, then, of love and dust. Each seemed to make the other more poignant, each — love, mortality — felt most keenly by its effect on other things. Love by its effect on the lover and loved, mortality by its effect on the living. In Gaza, in so many places, death and dust swirl around the living, and the love of the living cries out for the many many dead. Children carry scars seen and unseen, and all of it reaches around the world impacting us whether we see it or not.
This week, I’ve been at my Aunt’s funeral. There was a line in a poem that was shared: ‘…the feelings that we share here will transcend just what we see…’ Everyone in the room knew it was true.
And yet we live in skeptical times that often ask to see in order to know, just as doubting Thomas needed to touch the wounds of Jesus to believe in something as world-upending and beautiful as the resurrection. There are occasions which benefit from a level of skepticism, but we can end up trusting only our minds and our intellect, becoming disembodied in our knowing and distrustful of anything that our minds can’t access. Other things suffer too, I think, with this skepticism — the unprofitable, slow-to-manifest gifts of patience and forgiveness, of community and beauty. You only need look at many city skylines and see where the investment now goes — not into civic spaces, libraries, community centres, places of faith, but banks, offices, plush flats and shopping centres, all of which seem to be designed like beauty is no longer a quality worth prioritising; like there are no goals beyond financial return; designed with, as Hadden Turner said in a recent edition of his newsletter, “the folly of efficiency diligently pursued.”
We live in a universe where hard-to-see things like DNA and dark matter, love and mortality, caregiving and wounds are daily realities whether we see them or not. This is something that the 1943 French children's book The Little Prince knew:
“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
A 1943 Kirkus review hoped that the book: “…may be read by the right people, those rare adults who can go over the border of the Never Never Land without a backward look, who can sense intuitively that intangible outer fringe of unreality that is wholly real to children.” And P.L.Travers, author of Mary Poppins, said “…The Little Prince will shine upon children with a sidewise gleam. It will strike them in some place that is not the mind and glow there until the time comes for them to comprehend it.”
Increasingly I find myself seeking the company of others who can sense those intangible outer fringes. I think that’s perhaps where the world gets created and recreated.
Writing is in some ways like shaping life from DNA — it uses a string of letters that create meaning and form and function; not from the individual letters and marks on the page, but in their combination, and in what happens between marks on a page and reception by a person. Words can make us feel, tell us how to form, how to function, how to be. The Little Prince has always been a book that does that for me.
But what do we do with all this? Sometimes I think we prefer solutions more than the questions themselves; we want to rush to lessons and outcomes. Who has time for the inefficiency of anything else? I started this piece with some idea of the conclusions I wanted to reach. But I realised that the only true thing as I wrote was an awareness of the unseen. I had no honest conclusions, so in the spirit of Mary Oliver’s encouragement not to bypass the mystery, I deleted them. Sometimes mysteries unfold and hidden truths get uncovered, but not always. Still, I’d like our culture to value other kinds of seeing and knowing (maybe even not-knowing) as much as head-knowing, and to see attention — and investment — given to things like beauty and the often-intangibility of community, even without immediate or ever visible proof of ‘return’ on that investment. Whether that happens or not, the beautiful unseen is everywhere, striking in places that aren’t the mind; giving life like the sun even when all we see are clouds.
I’m curious — is the unseen something you think about, trust, ignore? Where does skepticism or mystery show up in your life? What do you know without seeing?
Thank you for being here. I’m trying to carve a living around motherhood, and I won’t do regular ‘upsells’ as it can be annoying, but I’d simply like to invite you to support my work if you’re able and want to. I’d love it if you could! In addition to my regular pieces for all subscribers, from Feb 29th 2024 (a leap year! a gift!) I’m offering some extra things for paid subscribers, by way of appreciation:
Insights from the narrative non-fiction book I’m working on - extracts, challenges, successes, reference material. It’ll be a real-time journey.
Monthly coaching corner - I’ll offer my writing, editorial, and coaching experience to support writers, creators and wayfinders (plus space to discuss).
Soil and Soul - occasional reflective pieces about the unseen, the numinous, aliveness, the sacred.
…and perhaps other things as this space evolves. And of course, the unseen reality of my deep gratitude.
Love, Elizabeth.
In the final story of Agatha Christie’s book ‘The Mysterious Mr Quin’ her character Mr Satterthwaite quotes from Oscar Wilde’s tale ‘The Happy Prince’:
“Bring me the two most precious things in the city, said God”
(Following your thoughts on Ash Wednesday & Valentine’s Day there is an enticing Ice cream available now with a combination of Charcoal & Coconut Milk.)
The fringes - curiously yes the succour can sometimes be there on the outer peripheries like the dark matter & mystery. Travelling and chance meetings and their depth of effect - being free or at least being able to absorb from a greater distance is life enhancing.
Really important to have / have had an Uncle & Aunt and cousins as slightly intangible, slightly distant support as well.
Great, Elizabeth. Thank you.