A Gathering of Spirits Sunday Reflections - I Do Not Know Its Name

Reader Poll, Recommendations, Tour & Carrie's Creek Photos

Anniversary Reader Poll

Hi Everyone,  It's been about a year since we started this online community, here's a brief survey, it should only take 2 minutes, its anonymous and I'd love your feedback, ya’ll are what makes this community so thoughtful and special!

Here's the link: https://forms.gle/AY1W9J24hKKWpnY36
Let me know what you think! 

Recommendation and Title Change

Hey…title confusion!   I’m giving my weekly Sunday posts a new name, “A Gathering of Spirits Sunday Reflections”. My Substack collegue and brilliant writer, Diana Butler Bass, uses the title “Sunday Musings”. So sorry for any confusion for those of you who read both of our postings. If you aren’t yet familiar with Diana’s Substack page “The Cottage” I totally recommend it. It’s smart, thoughtful, insightful writing, a great podcast and a must read for those interested in progressive spiritual commentary. I enjoy reading weekly and have a Supporting Subscriber membership. ….I just missed the title and zoomed immediately to the posting whenever I saw The Cottage come up in my Substack feed!  Here’s the link for The Cottage. 

Photo by Bogomil Mihaylov on Unsplash

Sunday Reflection

“I find you there in all these things I care for like a brother. A seed, you nestle in the smallest of them, and in the huge ones spread yourself hugely. Such is the amazing play of the powers: they give themselves so willingly, swelling in the roots, thinning as the trunks rise, and in the high leaves, resurrection.” - Rainer Marie Rilke The Book of Hours I, 22

I’ve loved Rilke’s The Book of Hours ever since a dear friend pressed a copy in my hands many years ago and said, “Read this, it was written for you.” That old paperback copy is now dog-eared, passages underlined with notes in the margins, written with many pencils from many readings. I encountered this poem again this week and was taken by how a poem or song, quote or passage of a beloved book, can take on new meaning as I encounter it through the lens of my current experience.

I think that is why I can continue to sing older songs - that have become old friends and their meaning continue to unfold.

In this poem, the poet attempts to describe something mysterious and luminous in the world, but chooses not to call it by a single name. When a mystery is named and placed in a container, it stops being a metaphor, and its mean is limited to the walls of that small container. The author Laozi wrote in The Tao Te Ching, “The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.” It seems to me that there is a wide and wild connective tissue in the universe. We feel it when our hearts expand with the last chords of a beautiful song. We sense it when the setting sun glows upon the water, first amber then rose then purple and finally a liquid moving quicksilver. We notice it when we look into the eyes of our newborn child and time expands in all directions. Rilke wrote “A seed, you nestle in the smallest of them, and in the huge ones spread yourself hugely.” I felt that connection, that silver thread, the connective tissue, yesterday when I picked up a tiny snail along the creek bed and placed it my palm, marveling when I remembered that this is the same shape as the Condor Galaxy, the largest known spiral galaxy, with the isophotal diameter of over 717,000 light-years. We see it in every act of unadorned kindness, in every whisper through the trees, in the smallest seed and the largest widest night sky - and as Rilke wrote “swelling in the roots, thinning as the trunks rise, and in the high leaves, resurrection.”

I have a song that I wrote after reading that first chapter of the Tao Te Ching called “I Do Not Know Its Name”.

Standing in the river barefoot in the current 
I hear a bird call and try to learn it 
The water is a wonder, it's cold and fast and deep 
I saw fish go swimming out too far for me to reach 

I do not know its name 
Swimmer or watcher 
But I believe that there is always something 
Moving beneath the water .....

Question:

Is there a poem, song or passage that has continued to grow and deepen for you with time? Is there a moment when you felt the nameless and it was enough to just call it Mystery?

A Great Wild Mercy

The new album is finished and we’ll be releasing singles starting in July! I’ll be doing a series of postings that explore the topics of the songs on the collection as the songs are released.

I was mucking around in the creek yesterday and created a little message in geodes to the universe….I think we are all ready to put down our umbrellas and feel the rain…and lean into a great wild mercy.

Tour Schedule

Here’s a list of some of my upcoming public concerts and workshops. You can check out my website tour page for more details. www.carrienewcomer.com/tour