Curious About The Fog
On purpose, poetry and finding a path.
The boat mirroring crystalline moonlight
deep into the night, I leave candles unlit.
— Opposite A Post-Station, My Boat Moonlit Beside A Monastery, by Tu Fu.1
Resonant World #15
On Saturday, my father gave me a belated Christmas present: A copy of David Hinton’s Awakened Cosmos. It’s a book of works by Tu Fu (712-770 C.E.), China’s greatest classical poet, who wrote some of his most enduring verses during a civil war so devastating that it either killed or displaced two-thirds of the country’s population. (You can find some of Tu’s poems at Hinton’s website here).
Though the gift would ostensibly seem to have arrived a little late, it seemed to conform to a kind of Kairos — the ancient Greek concept of opportune time.
Dad had handed me the book during a break from the latest installment of Thomas Hübl’s Timeless Wisdom Training, a two-year immersion into individual, ancestral and collective trauma, and how we can come together to heal.
One of the themes we’d been exploring during this most recent four-day retreat (held over Zoom) was our relationship to purpose, and how to bring more of this sometimes elusive quality into our daily lives.
Imagined Future
The question of purpose — or rather my purpose — has been a big one for me.
For some time now, I’ve felt a calling to trauma work. I launched Resonant World with an intent to harness my journalistic background to serve the growing numbers of people involved in creating the kinds of communities and spaces that can help to integrate cultural and inter-generational wounds.
Emboldened by a suggestion I’d picked up in some of the enormous tonnage of self-help content I’ve devoured over my lifetime, I’d started writing a commitment statement in the start of my journal a couple of years ago:
“Through my journalism; books; podcasts; films, online courses and workshops, I serve as a catalyst for exponential advances in the healing of collective trauma at scale; in turn contributing powerfully to the resolution of our ecological; social; econonomic and spiritual crises.”
Re-reading it now, it still feels powerfully resonant for me — if a touch daunting.
But purpose — at least in my mind — had always been a mental concept. An idea. A construct. And in that sense, it inevitably risked falling prey to a certain circularity, since I could only ever project what I thought I knew about the past into an imagined future. I’m picturing now the mythological image of the ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail.
How, then, to establish conditions to allow something truly evolutionary and innovative to arise? To move from immersion in the horizontal plane of the material world, to access the vertical dimension of true innovation and depth?
Reaching for the Keys
Through guided meditations during the retreat, I began to recognise purpose in a new way. Purpose seemed to manifest itself within me as a subtle flow of energy — a unique frequency that felt like it had a life and intelligence of its own, beyond my ideas about what could or should be.
Physically, purpose felt like a filigree branching pattern of sensation spreading out from a spot diagonally below my solar plexus — in the centre of my abdomen. Instead of my purpose being something “out there” I’d need to chase, it felt available as a wordless, inner impulse I could learn to follow in each moment, if I could get quiet enough to allow this aspect of my subtle anatomy to come online.
The simplicity of this discovery was electrifying.
It was as if the guidance I’d been seeking outside had been there all along. It wasn’t even particularly well concealed. It just took a moment of opening up to the possibility that purpose might lie inside of me to catch a glimpse of it — like the glint of a bunch of keys dropped in a gutter, half buried by rain-wet leaves.
Collective Intelligence
And this raised another question: What if this process of attuning to our individual purpose-stream is part of a wider orchestration? I’ve witnessed now, many times, how a collective intelligence seems to operate in groups that establish a high degree of internal coherence. In my experience, it’s as if this pre-existing intelligence is made visible through individual relational practices, and skilled facilitation.
This collective intelligence seems to attend to the process in such a way that the taut legacies of generations of trauma begin to unspool their coils as readily and inexorably as a tangled ball of string unknotted and smoothed by invisible hands, perhaps the hands of our ancestors.
A few weeks back, a fellow participant in the Timeless Wisdom Training had generously gifted me some coaching time to help me refine my ideas of purpose. Towards the end of our two-hour session, he had raised the question of belonging — in the sense that we all have a need to belong, and finding that sense of belonging can be both a source of struggle, and a spur to action.
And as we explored this dilemma, he suggested something that also struck me as radical:
“Perhaps you can belong to your purpose.”
So maybe now my purpose no longer needs to be written in words — though words may spring from it. Maybe my purpose is an energy stream that wells up within me, and whose guidance will always whisper — if I can remember to listen.
Awakened Cosmos
Which brings me back to Tu Fu.
As Hinton writes in his introduction, Tu lived at the height of the Tang Dynasty — a legendary epoch of “peace, prosperity and unrivaled cultural achievement.” But in 755, when Tu was 43, the outbreak of civil war forced him into a new life as an itinerant wanderer, constantly struggling to survive. As Hinton writes:
“This made his life emblematic of the refugee nature of things — the existence-tissue Cosmos all change and transformation, a perpetual state of departure.”
Before Tu, the high points of Chinese poetry had described profound moments of insight gleaned among the timeless embrace of river and mountain. But some of Tu’s most important works explored life as a refugee in a time of bloodshed and chaos. In Western literature, critics might have considered this an “impressive range.” But Hinton explains that there’s much more to Tu’s writing about his gritty circumstances:
“In the Chinese conceptual framework…it represents Tu’s mastery of living as the Cosmos awakened to itself. For in its elemental gaze, the Cosmos too accepts everything.”
Reading this reminded me of something Thomas Hübl said towards the end of the retreat.
To paraphrase: So often we can feel lost. We can feel like we’re not achieving enough, haunted by a nagging fear that we are not realising our potential. Sometimes life goes smoothly and we feel like we’re driving somewhere on a sunny, clear day. But sometimes — maybe a lot of the time — it’s as if we’re driving through fog.
If we see the fog as a problem and resist it, it congeals — almost as if the fog starts to form a solid object, blocking our path.
But if we meet the fog with curiosity, we make space for it — and as our inner space expands, we can host more of the reality we perceive outside. We remember that in our karmic world, delay is as much a part of life as movement. We begin to take time to explore our relationship to our experience in the moments that feel harder — not resist them. And we can make a conscious choice to spend time synchronizing with our own essence — that branching energy I felt deep down in my gut.
It feels appropriate to leave the last word for now to Tu. The poems in Awakened Cosmos are truly stunning. Here is First Moon2:
Thin slice of ascending light, a radiant arc
tipped aside bellied dark—the first moon
appears and, barely risen beyond ancient
frontier passes, edges into clouds. Silver,
changeless, the Star River spreads across
mountains empty in their own cold. Lucent
frost dusts the courtyard, chrysanthemum
blossoms clotted there with swollen dark.
Highly Recommended: Wounded Healers
I’m writing this well after midnight shortly after attending the incredibly powerful online launch party for the Wounded Healers Portrait Series, which grew out of Dr Angel Acosta’s work in healing-centred education in the United States. (I wrote about Angel’s dialogue with Dr Bayo Akomolafe during the Collective Trauma Summit 2022 in Resonant World #6).
There’s a lot I’d like to capture about what I’ve just learned, but since the hour is late here in London, I hope to return to Wounded Healers in more depth in a future edition of Resonant World. For now, I can’t do better than to warmly recommend you spend some time on the Wounded Healers website, which words alone can’t do justice.
Here is an excerpt from the intro:
“This portrait series captures the profiles of nine educators, community leaders and practitioners, all of whom have dedicated their lives to — in some shape or form — creating spaces for others to thrive, flourish and heal. We call them the Wounded Healers.
The concept “wounded healer” finds its roots in both Carl Jung's work and in Greek mythology. For Jung, the wounded healer represented the sensitivity and understanding of one’s own wounds and how this informs helping others heal. As Wounded Healers, they use their deep understanding of trauma to create conditions for collective flourishing and know the importance of engaging in their own personal healing work to authentically be of service to others.”
Have a look, and you’ll see some truly remarkable individuals, and hear their words.
And do check out Angel’s podcast interviews accompanying the portraits.
What I’m Reading
Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry, by David Hinton.
Overcoming polarization in crises: A research project on trauma and democracy with over 350 citizens, by Adrian Wagner; Judith Strasser and Niko Schäpke. An important report on the work of the Pocket Project, a nonprofit dedicated to the integration of individual, ancestral and collective trauma.
This powerful thread on collective trauma from Arnesa Buljušmić-Kustura:
I write Resonant World in time outside my job at nonprofit climate news service DeSmog. Any donation is hugely appreciated — and makes a material difference in boosting my caffeine intake. Thank you for all those who’ve generously bought me coffees thus far! And please do share this newsletter with anyone you feel might enjoy it.
Hinton, D. Awakened Cosmos: Inside the Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry. (Boulder: Shambala Publications, 2019) 125.
Ibid, 59.
Love your description of what purpose feels like in your body. It all comes down to this.