Essence of Qui - First Post!
/On these humble pages, I hope to share moments of Qui with you. Let me begin with the name, Essence of Qui. I love the letter "Q"! It's quiet and quirky simultaneously, and that feels like me. Quiescence has long been a favorite word because it's tastes like violin music on my tongue. So, I thought "Yes! Quiescence is the perfect domain name!" Well...Imagine a tire going flat and you have the perfect visual for my spirit deflating when I discovered the name was already taken. Now what? I decided to talk to my youngest son about it. He's home from college for the summer, he's a great writer - time to brainstorm! I explained my dilemma as we drove to an appointment. "Okay, define quiescence for me - that might inspire a new word." Hunter looked thoughtful, fingers to chin...."mmmm...Quiescence is... (wait for it!)... the essence of qui." He laughed, only joking. But I loved it! It was sunbeams spilling through cloud cover! And I had this knowing inside that it was already mine! A few hours later we made it official. Thank you, Hunter!
As I said in the Overview, words don't reach where Qui lives - EVER. Qui lives beneath words. Happily though, there are soul-inhabited words that cast light on its shadowy threshold...words that drift in close, and speak the language of stillness and keyholes. Words that offer a wee glimpse of the essence of things. I'll do my best to find those words, to speak that language.
Magic Words
In the very earliest time,
when both people and animals lived on earth,
a person could become an animal if he wanted to
and an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
and sometimes animals
and there was no difference.
All spoke the same language.
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance
might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
and what people wanted to happen could happen—
all you had to do was say it.
Nobody could explain this:
That's the way it was.
Translated from the Inuit by Edward Field
I have collected magical words since I was a child. Yes, I had a word collection. Silly me. While my friends made a mad dash for the latest barbie outfit, I cuddled against trees, loving the slick feel of a new notebook, and the soft, bumpy scrape of a fresh page under my palm. I started collecting them because I found I had to make pictures in my mind about things in order to understand them. Only the magical words helped me do that. They offered immediate, concrete understanding as sound, scribbled shape, and meaning converged from fragments into wholeness. I adored the soft shimmer of silence wrapped in the hush-a-by plushy feel of harmony - so every time I found an enchanted word, I copied it into a notebook. Every time I added a word glistened by soul, I wondered why we needed any other kind of words at all.
Many words are impotent - useless chatter and bang, but magic words zero in on the target, they pull our inner vision toward true north, toward essence - away from label. They express a "conversation with" not a "conversation about". With that in mind, my specific hope is to tap your ear with a touch of magical word music, and offer you a look through my kaleidoscope of quiet.
Quiescence... It's pleasing music rolls off the tongue perfectly wrapped in circles. When things are wrapped in circles, to me - that is the sign of a gift. Circles and spirals speak the language of breath, life force, love, eternity. They originate from silence, they know the essence of things. Quiescence IS its sound. Say it and you'll see what I mean. There it goes, precisely hushing away noise and distraction while introducing its inner essence of stillness. All those velvety sounds and shapes converge, and it's barely a whisper of a word...and it points the way to presence. I love the embrace I feel in that union, the contentment in that hug of a word. It speaks of paradox, of a merging that is at the same time, a detaching. It invites my shy soul to come out from behind the curtain, to throw open the doors and windows and experience the gift of eternity that waits in each moment.
Art, photography, and music also speak to my soul. There are works that bring tears to my eyes, I feel them so deeply. They are magic carpets that carry me beyond ordinary fields of experience and hover me nearer to the threshold of the in-between - that magical, luminous reality where pause is the keystone, and presence is the only requirement. God rests there, in the tender, strong place of that Mingling. William Blake believed that Imagination is God in man. Alex Gray, author of "The Mission of Art" wrote that art can be a bridge to the "spiritual in everyday life." He explained the transcendent touch and pull of soul-filled art as follows:
"The viewer first encounters a work of art as a physical object seen by the eye of flesh. Secondly, the eye of reason sees a harmony of sensations that stir the emotions, and a conceptual understanding of the art arises. Third, and only in the deepest art, a condition of the soul is revealed, one's heart is opened, and spiritual insight is transmitted to the eye of contemplation."
The word rule sticks true here too - magical works of music, art and photography are lampposts lit from inspiration, from God's own breath. They illuminate. They point to the essence of a thing. My soul spins circles round the floor of my heart when I encounter a tender, soul-stirring delicacy. No wonder ancient artists believed a beautifully crafted work drew down divine presence to inhabit it. My husband, Brad, captures this magic in many of his photos. His gift holds a candle to the keyhole. It takes my chin, and adjusts my view. I am pulled in - Alice, falling down the rabbit hole. Away from my self-stories to the Essence of Qui, where life is thick with beauty, brimming with miracles, dancing with possibility.
In one of my favorite books on writing, If You Want to Write: A Book about, Art, Independence and Spirit, Brenda Ueland highlights the true magic of a moment captured by art:
“When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. He sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lamppost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: "It is so beautiful I must show you how it looks." And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it.
When I read this letter of Van Gogh's, it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were. And you were extremely careful about *design' and *balance' and getting *interesting planes' into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest *academical' tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on.
But the moment I read Van Gogh's letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.
And Van Gogh's little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care.”I love that. It illustrates how the creative impulse arises from mingling with the essence of things. It is God waking up in us, an incandescent thread that weaves delight with spirit and flesh into the breath of becoming. Do you feel the truth of that? The beauty of that? I don't know about you - but it drizzles and fizzles me with that lemony, giggly, ticklish feeling of meteor showers shooting across my skin. And that's my sign that I am unfolding in the right direction, feeding my soul the right food. Rest and fall inward. Witness. Repeat.
So, walk with me a while. Let's sit with the essence of qui.