Beyond Words

More than two months have passed since I’ve written anything for this blog, or even for my own journal. In November and early December there were unanticipated family responsibilities that took up the time I usually saved for writing. But, even when I had done what I had to do and I found time to write again, I could not find the words I needed. Somewhere on my hard drive are 8 or 10 half-finished drafts of entries for this blog. So far I have not been able to complete any of them. It isn’t exactly writer’s block. There are lots of words on those pages. But as I re-read them, I find them..... irrelevant ... to what I really want to say.

What I would most like to be able to express is what it feels like for me to be with horses these days... what it feels like to connect with a horse, to hear him, to know her in this moment. But that experience, or rather, those fleeting, evanescent experiences that land like butterflies in the midst of our everyday interactions, defy my ability to capture them. The moment I try to put them into a pen of words, they escape, they disappear.... and leave me wondering if they ever really existed.

By its very nature, heart-to-heart connection is beyond words; the experience is richer, deeper, more multifaceted and multidimensional than words, mere symbols of “the thing itself”, can ever be.

Still, some writers, some poets, have found words to give others a sense of experience-beyond-words. Rumi was one of them. So, I’ll borrow his words -- which were not about horses -- to give a sense of what I’m struggling to say about what being with horses is like for me these days. (All quotations are from “The Illuminated Rumi”, translations and commentary by Coleman Barks.)

“Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing there is a field.

I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.”

******

“There was a dawn I remember when my soul heard something from your soul.

I drank water from your spring and felt the current take me.”

*******

“Yesterday at dawn

my friend said, ‘how long will this unconsciousness go on?

You fill yourself with the sharp pain of love rather than its fulfillment.’

I said, ‘But I can’t get to you!

You are the whole dark night, and I am a single candle.

My life is upside down because of you.’

The Friend replied,

‘I am your deepest being.

Quit talking about wanting me.....’ ”

“Friend, there’s a window that opens from heart to heart, and there are ways of closing it completely,

not a needle’s eye of access. Open or shut, both ways are sometimes appropriate.

The deepest ignorance is not to know about this window...”

******

“You’ve heard it said there’s a window that opens from one mind to another.

But if there’s no wall, there’s no need for fitting the window, or the latch.”

******

...But for the way we have to go, words are no preparation.

There’s no getting ready other than grace...”

******

“From the hundreds of times I lost the connection, I learn this: your fragrance brings me back. Inside that I become a feast day with aloeswood burning, the pure empty sky around the moon. Then I make promises. I break them. And same as before, I try to find you by thinking and reading about finding. No help there!”

As Barks writes in his commentary on the above quotation: “..... Words and images can never give the experience. .... The dis-connection Rumi speaks of here, everyone understands. The re-connection.... can only be lived.”

******

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.”

*******

“I have no more words. Let the soul speak with the silent articulation of a face.”