The Dearest Freshness Deep Down Things ~ Part One: 'Springing'
Stepping into a Persian miniature, I begin to realise that poetry is not just a way of writing about the world. It is a way of bringing forth life.
‘Everything is gestation and then bringing forth’
RAINER MARIA RILKE
PART ONE ~ ‘SPRINGING’
(you can read the whole essay here )
I stand barefoot mid-stream. The waters of a nascent River Derwent skirt around my ankles. Eyes closed, all my awareness is taken up by the shimmering membrane of meeting between woman and water. The notion of there being a ‘subject’ and an ‘environment’ vanishes. What remains is an intimacy that feels palpable and joyous. Perhaps, I muse, this is how it feels to be a rock in a riverbed. An ancient and steadfast fragment of original earth in conversation with a fleeting moment of life in its becoming.[i]
Whether I am standing in the current of a mountain stream, attending to a dream my client is sharing, or delighting in a robin scouting for worms in my garden, I long to encounter what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls ‘the dearest freshness deep down things.’[i] I am drawn to the springing of life, to the ‘shimmering membrane’ where life first bubbles up, blinking its inkling eye in the bright world of matter and form.
Experiencing the freshness and vitality of wild water through my senses and my imagination, I feel a deep affinity. The life force that rushes, burbles, ripples, skims, drifts and meanders, is not so very different from my own. Neither is the journey from source to sea. Immersed in this other-wise nature, I remember what our ancestors once knew: we ‘conceive’ ourselves through our affinity with the living world, a vital realm rippling with submerged stories and images which offer us an equivalence to our own unfolding narratives.
I am not suggesting here that ‘nature’ is a mirror reflecting human experience (this would be little more than anthropomorphic conceit), but I am convinced that our lives are expressions of a deep interpenetration of vital energies and imaginal forms that ‘lend’ themselves to each other. These affinities are constantly offered up from a subtle realm in which all kinds of interweaving and coalescing forces are forever stirring. We encounter traces of this field of emergence through the language of dreams. But our waking life is no less seeded with revelation, with fresh insight and understanding which longs to be born into our lived experience. Everything, Rilke insists, ‘everything is gestation and then bringing forth’.[ii] We are woven into a poetic ecology.
Conceiving
‘When the soul wants to experience something’, wrote Meister Eckhart, ‘she throws out an image in front of her and steps into it.’[iii] In speaking of ‘soul’ here, I understand him to mean the animating principle of life itself (‘anima mundi’), a submerged wellspring which conceives life. An ‘image’ thrown in front of us could be a moment where we experience something familiar in a new way; a sudden noticing of something in its vital and incomparable particularity; a felt resonance with words (sung, spoken or written); or the trace impression of a dream. Sometimes the thrown image is a work of art which speaks intimately to us.
Often emerging ‘out of the blue’, these imaginal inklings rarely arrive with any great fanfare. Revelation is often a quiet thing. The ‘image’ stands before us like a deer emerging from the forest. Hesitant and tentative, it will not wait long before disappearing back into the trees. Cézanne described this threshold of immanence as a ‘flickering universe, the hesitation of things.’[iv]
We conceive ourselves, Eckhart suggests, through noticing the images that soul throws in front of us and then stepping into them. By experiencing the image, we participate in the bringing forth of life in all the multiple possibilities of its essentially dynamic and emergent nature.
Wandering recently through an exhibition of art from the great Mughal empire, at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, I stumble on a little painting from a sixteenth century Persian manuscript, ‘Ferdowsi’s Shah-Nama’ (Book of Kings). In it we see the beautiful princess Rudabeh lowering her raven hair for the young man Zal to climb up. This tender telling of what we might know as the Rapunzel story draws from an earlier epic poem (completed around 1010) which remains central to Iranian culture to this day. Like so many of these early Mughal miniatures, the picture is infused with aliveness. Trees, flowers, water, even the rocks, appear to ripple, shimmer and vibrate. Moved by the freshness and tenderness of the painting I find myself ‘stepping into’ it.
‘Zal approaches the palace of Rudabeh’, Persian miniature c.1590 ~ from The Keir Collection of Islamic Art, on loan to the Victoria & Albert Museum, London 2025
I encounter two figures, a woman reaching down and a man reaching up in an intimate gesture of reciprocity and longing. This life-giving mutuality is mirrored in the stream which pours down from a hidden spring, whilst the trees and flowers face up towards a golden sky. The woman’s long dark hair and the stream tumbling down mirror each other. Both transmit aliveness between different elements of the whole. Both suggest the essential ‘bringing forth’ of life (symbolically, hair often represents this life-giving quality, since each strand is constantly renewed as it grows out). The stream leads us towards the refreshment of an ornamental pond, replete with ducks splashing, delighting in the uninterrupted flow of life coursing through them.
What moves me most in the painting is its sense of freshness. It’s as though everything is springing into life. Lingering a while, it occurs to me that all the living forms depicted here spring from somewhere beyond our line of sight. The stream emerges from a source concealed in the folded mountains. Rudabeh’s hair is fed by tiny crimson rivulets invisible under her skin. The trees and flowers are nourished by underground root systems entwined with infinitely complex mycelial networks.
Nora Bateson describes this originating subterranean source as ‘a realm of potential change, a necessarily obscured zone of wild interactions of unseen, unsaid, unknown flexibility’.[v] Our own feeling, imagining and desiring draw us towards this kindling realm because this is where experience is at its most vital and refreshing. Somewhere deep beyond our conscious knowing, we trust that this is where we may find our own unique form and experience of aliveness. For we are not bystanders in the ‘flickering universe’, we too are expressions of the essential forthcoming of life. Like rivers, trees, plants and animals, our purpose is to bring forth and transmit the vital singularity of our being-in-the world:
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it.[vi] Martha Graham
What this quickening life longs for is the undivided attention of a heart open to symbolic and allegorical meaning, a mind tuned to the possibility that there is always ‘more than meets the eye’. Children quite naturally see this way. The most unremarkable fragment of experience becomes a keyhole, opening onto an intricately articulated hinterland. We have only to think of the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland or the wardrobe in C. S. Lewis’ Narnia adventures to remember the revelatory powers of this portal vision.
The notion that the living world consists of more than cold hard facts, is not mere child’s play. Einstein himself paid tribute to the existence of other dimensions, seedbeds of unrealised possibility alive beneath the surface of observed life:
Nature shows us only the tail of the lion. But there is no doubt in my mind that the lion belongs with it even if he cannot reveal himself to the eye all at once because of his huge dimension.[vii] Albert Einstein
If we are to experience these vital depths, to under-stand life, we need to recognise ‘life’ as a verb (‘life-ing’) and not just as a noun; to experience life in its ‘becoming’ and not just in its ‘being’. Life in its becoming is tender, uncertain and fluid. It shies away from the narrow confines of definitive articulation. What is as yet un-known, un-considered and un-realized cannot be grasped through the solidifying language of preconception. The literal and the abstract kill the inkling stone dead.
Yet we live increasingly in a world dazzled by the cold hard glare of screens and bound by the authority of ‘self-evident’ truths cemented in a vocabulary littered with abstract nouns. Across all the sciences, including psychology, we have largely stripped out the ‘poetic’ understanding which illuminated Einstein’s conceptions, relegating the ‘unseen’ to the world of mere fancy. Attending only to what has already been conceived, perceived and labelled, we overlook the presence of the ‘lion’ and believe that the ‘tail’ is all there is to be seen.
Meanwhile, the living world continues to show us rivers flowing from underground springs, tree roots drawing up nutrients from the soil-swathed underworld, human life conceived in the hidden depths of the womb. Is it really so strange then to believe that our evolving conceptions of ourselves, our thoughts, feelings and intimations, arise from a similarly vital unseen network of implicate coalescing correlations?
Recognising this life-giving subterranean coalescence, Nora Bateson offers us the word ‘aphanipoeisis’ (from Greek aphanis = ‘obscured’, ‘unseen’ and poesis = ‘to make’, ‘bring forth’). Restoring ‘poetry’ to its more dynamic original sense, poiesis (‘to bring forth’), the whole of the living world is essentially poetic. A garden can be ‘poetic’, a meeting, a shared meal, a relationship, and of course a poem. At the same time, none of these are necessarily ‘poetic’ (even the poem!) To establish the poetic credentials of any process, experience or endeavour we might ask: Does it feel vital? Does it render life more vivid? Does it conceive more life? Does it expand or enrich our experience of aliveness? Does it deepen our under-standing of life?
Cultivating an affinity towards the essential poiesis of life matters in science as it does in art. For it is so often the emergent (‘the wanting-to-be-born’), the unspoken and the unforeseen, which bring forth the very qualities, images and energy we need to conceive ourselves afresh as we move forward on our journey towards maturity, as individuals and as a community of beings.
Opening
Following our stream down the folded mountains and into the walled garden, we see its life-giving freshness flow into the ornamental pond and then fall away in a steep drop. Either side the water flows outwards spreading its freshness across the flower-strewn garden. It’s as though the pond represents a life, or a moment in life, which is constantly letting in and letting go.
We tend to imagine the act of perception as an outward movement in which our sight travels to engage with a subject out there, at a distance. In my experience, poetic vision is primarily an act of letting in. To see afresh, to experience life in its becoming, there needs to be an opening in me. Vulnerability is the doorway to conception. Open to all that is not yet known or understood, I become receptive to something vital and unforeseen which cuts through the heart of my preconceptions. Wonder takes root in my seeing.
Many of us are wary of opening to life in its becoming. Perhaps we fear the flow will not come (the river may have dried up or taken a different course), or we worry that too much life might pour in. Receiving life through an opened heart, we risk encountering inconvenient truths, bone-shaking burials and blinding revelations. Like the Greek Cassandra, we may find that it is not so easy to bear the gift of insight in a blind and blinkered world. Perhaps this is why the word ‘wonder’ shares its root with the German Wunde, meaning ‘wound’.
Open to the ever-flowing stream (the poiesis of life) we place ourselves at risk of flooding, unless like our pond, we allow life to flow on beyond us. We open to let life in, and we also open to let life out. The little Persian pond, with its openings on all sides reminds us that we cannot grasp, bottle, or contain the river’s flow without losing its life-giving vitality.
... one cannot bathe twice in the same river because already, in his inmost recesses, the human being shares the destiny of flowing water . . . A being dedicated to water is a being in flux. He dies every minute; something of his substance is constantly falling away.[viii] Gaston Bachelard
If we are to ‘share the destiny of flowing water’, to bear the ‘falling away’ of life, we need to trust in the replenishing source. Drawing a human equivalence with the little pond, we might say that to remain vital, we too must both open to the flow of life coming in and also open outwards to transmit life beyond ourselves. We must be lovers and creators. It is by transmitting life that we learn to trust there is always more life on its way.
And if, as we work, we can transmit life into our work,
life, still more life, rushes into us to compensate, to be ready
and we ripple with life through the days. [ix] D.H. Lawrence
Opening to the upwelling and transmission of life is an act of courage and of faith. We cannot know what messages the unforeseen may carry. The writers of the New Testament described faith as ‘the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen’.[x] In my experience, this faith in ‘the evidence of things not seen’ creates a kind of gravitational field which draws into view the tiniest specks of life in its becoming. These inklings surface in response to a quality of vision that has learned to trust in the life-giving poiesis, the abundant ‘bringing forth’ of life.
Distilling
The ducks in our Persian garden do not need to know the origin or destination of the river to experience something of its essential aliveness. They are content to encounter its vitality and freshness in the little pond which is their world. Likewise, the poet does not seek to encompass the whole story of life. She looks for life bubbling up in the here and now, in the small and the near, in the fleeting and the slight. For she knows, as William Blake avowed, that the universal is hidden in the particular. Heaven can be found in a wildflower, infinity in the palm of your hand.[xi]
Mary Oliver’s poem ‘Heron Rises From The Dark, Summer Pond’[xii] offers us a consummate example of how intimate encounter with the particular, can reveal the condition of life itself. In just a few lines, the poet bears witness to the improbable flight of a ‘long-necked, long-bodied heron’ which rises slowly from the thick water of the summer pond, defying its own heaviness. She finds herself wondering:
how unlikely it is
that death us a
hole in the ground,
how improbable
that ascension is
not possible
Like the little pond in our Persian painting, each poem is a distillation of life, a moment of infinity held briefly in the palm of our hand. We find these qualities of distillation and implication most perfectly expressed in the tradition of haiku, like this one from Matsuo Bashō[xiii]:
The temple bell stops –
but the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers
The haiku, or hokku as it was known in Bashō’s day, is ‘one-breath poetry’, traditionally just seventeen syllables (5-7-5). The beauty of this poetic short form is that it is pocket size (like our little duck pond). Because we can hold the poem in our attention all at once, we can take in the manifold inference of its vision, without having to comprehend it in a linear way. The experience of its conception remains intact. Uninjured. Alive.
The haiku’s enigmatic power comes from all that it refuses to spell out. Bashō leaves us with a mere trace of the temple bell’s sounding. He suggests that the sound of the sacred is not confined to places of worship but vibrates all around us as the resonance of creation itself. The temple can fall. Religions come and go. But the sound of life ringing forth never ceases. All this in a mere dozen words.
Understanding that experience is only ever ‘a momentary enchantment plucked out of the vast world’[xiv], the poet does not presume to encompass or define reality. Using language that gestures towards the ‘flickering universe’, he honours the potency of the implicit.
To be continued…
Coming soon on Substack: ‘THE DEAREST FRESHNESS’ ~ PART TWO: LONGING
[i] Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur, ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose’ (Penguin Classics, 1985).
[ii] Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (third Letter), Trans. M.D Herter Norton (W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 1954).
[iii] Meister Eckart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart (Crossroads Publishing Company, 2009).
[iv] Paul Cézanne, Conversations with Cézanne, ed. By Michael Doran (University of California Press, 2001).
[v] Nora Bateson, ‘Aphanipoesis’, from her collection of essays Combining (Triarchy Press, 2023).
[vi] Agnes De Mille, Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham (Vintage, 1992).
[vii] Albert Einstein, ‘Letter to Heinrich Zangger, 10 March 1914’ (The Albert Einstein Archives).
[viii] Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams an Essay on the Imagination of Matter (Dallas Institute of Humanities & Culture, 2021).
[ix] D.H. Lawrence, We are Transmitters, The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence (Wordsworth Poetry Library,1994).
[x] The New Testament: Hebrews 11.1
[xi] William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, ‘William Blake: The Complete Poems’ (Penguin Classics, 1977).
[xii] Mary Oliver, ‘Heron Rises From The Dark, Summer Pond’, in Felicity: Poems (Penguin Books, 2017)
[xiii] Matsuo Bashō, ‘The Temple Bell Stops’ (haiku translated by Robert Bly), from The sea and the honeycomb; A book of tiny poems, by Robert Bly (Beacon Press, 1971).
[xiv] Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook (Harper Collins Publishers, 1994).
A perfect springtime piece! Thank you for this lovely dive into that miniature...Love how you wove the different poems throughout...To see the minutiae of the world as wonder-filled is the poet's gift!