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I have been thinking about Jonathon Delacour and his recent play in the fields of meaning. And this quote triggered something:

“How do you interpret a thing? Don’t treat it indirectly or symbolically – look directly at it and choose spontaneously that aspect of it which is most immediately striking – the striking flash in consciousness or awareness, the most vivid, what sticks out in your mind.”

— John Welwood, Ordinary Magic: Everyday Life as Spiritual Path

This is what is going on: noticing the vivid internal responses to external things. Gazing upon their surfaces and trying to bore deeply into their cores. When we apprehend something – a photograph, a quote, a snippet of poetry, a story — we see only the surface that the creator is presenting. The interpretation is about us. The inward journey we take to the centre of the thing is really a dive into our own souls, our own worlds, enfolded in our own hearts. The rush of awareness — Welwood’s “striking flash” — is our own physiological response to the depth we have apprehended. It comes from nowhere else.

We are deep resevoirs of wisdom, I think. All of our realities and our fictions blur in the cauldron of our interior lives. When we experience dissonance and alarm when this line is transcended, we are experiencing our own realities collapsing, the shaky uncertainty of worlds colliding.

Quote via whiskey river