re-imagine and re-story your life and work

Mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-tender young and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of
the beginning and the end. (D H Lawrence)

The Storm Whale by Benjii Davies (2013 – both text and illustrations)
This month I’m offering two versions of this children’s story – the original and my adaptation. I connected to the original then amplified it, keeping the phrases I loved while substituting what I needed to enter the story. Some of these choices were conscious, others unconscious which you may well discover as these may relate to your journey.

Story stones along the path

Still ’round the corner there may wait A new road or secret gate… A day will come at last when I Shall take the hidden paths that run West of the Moon, East of the Sun. (Tolkien)

I love the sub-genre within travel writing where characters en route to a shrine, hiking remote nature trails or escaping terror, strew the path with Babushka dolls – stories within stories. Within the slow timeless time of traveling, life stories insert themselves as fellow pilgrims engage with their pasts and step into their future.

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Writers and musicians have long been intrigued by the apprentice ethos. Goethe’s narrative poem Der Zauberlehrling tells of a sorcerer who can turn a broomstick into a servant. The sorcerer’s apprentice overhears the magic formula and, one day when the old man is out, tries it out. The broomstick does his bidding and brings water from the nearby river. As the apprentice does not know how to turn off the spell, the water in the house rises.

In desperation the boy axes the broom into pieces. Each bit sweeps in more water. In the midst of the flood, the sorcerer returns. “Sir, my need is sore,” the apprentice pleads. “Spirits that I’ve cited/My commands ignore.” The sorcerer utters the magic word and restores order.

This month I share a praise poem for Louis van Loon, a mench who inspired, encouraged and befriended me. The poem included in his memorial service brochure, perhaps explains his influence on many. Here he is in his own voice:
“My understanding of Buddhism and my personal practice undiminished in their intensity. And I can see there is great meaning in non-doing and undoing where I can find refuge in watching life unfold all around me with deep gratitude.”

http://dorianhaarhoffblog.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/June-2024-letter-2.pdf

We are all endowed as story-tellers. There is a mystic in every one of us.
(Matthew Fox)

Terrapsychology
In the 1990s when researching The Writer’s Voice on a Fulbright at Stanford, I visited the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco to converse with physicist Brian Swimme, author of The Universe is a Green Dragon and the Universe Story.

This private university is light years ahead of many narrowly defined academic institutions. Their Department of Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness  is “dedicated to reimagining the human species as a mutually enhancing member of the earth community.” So it was with joy that I came across recently, located at CIIS, Terrapsychology – terra Latin for planet Earth.

http://dorianhaarhoffblog.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/May-2024-letter.pdf

I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps.
(Edith Wharton)

In March I had the privilege of spending 3 weeks in Namibia in Storyland, courtesy of the Carl Schlettwein Foundation in Basel. Sharing with and training carers, therapists, teachers, NGOs et al how to live their own story and share that knowledge and wisdom with children in need/at risk. How stories move through choice and change and offer us inside knowing. Multi-purpose muti.

http://dorianhaarhoffblog.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/April-2024-letter.pdf

A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves… Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger. (Ben Okri)

Part of my joyous encounter with people is creating, telling and sharing a story every Saturday morning on a what’s app broadcast group. Around 3 minutes. It arrives with a quotation that plays off and with the story. generating yet another conversation. During COVID it came out daily and now once a week.

I delight in the responses. Though it goes forth to some 500 people (a groupsend yet it arrives one-on-one.) Every week some 20 to 25 folk share how the story touches on and impacts on their lives. Some send images evoked. I cherish these creative responses.

So this month’s letter features this communication. A story stone dropped in the pond and the ripples circle out to lap on distant shores. A touch of Rilke here:

I am circling around God,
around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don’t know
if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.

http://dorianhaarhoffblog.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Feb-2024-letter.pdf

I wish you courage in a year of choice change in search of the happiness bird that alights on unexpected limbs.

[John Donne – Abiding Presence Priest and Poet Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail. Love, built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies. Death is an ascension to a better library. (John Donne 3 quotes)

We often know the works of a writer or poet and little about their lives. They are obviously connected although the writing stands alone. Take John Donne, born this month in 1572 dying at 59. Illness, doubt and death were ofttimes his companions. His father died when he was four. And then, as
a Catholic, he experienced prejudice to the extent that when he studied at Oxford and Cambridge he was not allowed to graduate. He was a soldier in the Spanish- English prolonged war, then became a Member of Parliament.

When 29, he eloped with Anne More a 17 year old against the father’s wishes. Donne was imprisoned together with the priest who
married them. His wry response? John Donne, Ann Donne, Undone. She bore 12 children, dying in childbirth when only 33. Two of them stillborn. Three dying before the age of 10. The couple often struggled with the grip of poverty around their throats. He converted to the Anglican Church and became Dean of St. Paul’s, well-known for his sermons. This playful, erotic, spiritual metaphysical poet bore the touch of the mystic in him.

http://dorianhaarhoffblog.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Jan-2024-letter-2.pdf

A Meister Eckhardt Meditation
Become aware of what is in you. Announce it,
pronounce it, produce it, and give birth to it.
(Eckhart)

This month I found for R10 this book (2012). Living in rural Ireland, James Bremmer, interested in spirituality, mysticism and philosophy, teaches creative writing. The title plays off Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now: A
Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (2004). The shoulders of the giants on which Bremmer stands include Thoreau, Dame Julian of Norwich, Jung, Hildegard von Bingen, William Blake, Rumi, Krishnamurthi and Diogenes.

(I based a Saturday morning story for 5 Nov on Diogenes. What’s app me if you wish to receive the stories) I began thinking of my giants of the past and Meister Eckhart (c. 1260 – c. 1328 ) suddenly knocked on my door. This letter is about how I have experienced him, partly filtered through Matthew Fox’s, creation spirituality.

http://dorianhaarhoffblog.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Dec-2023-letter.pdf