re-imagine and re-story your life and work

God, whose love and joy are present everywhere, can’t come to visit you
unless you aren’t there. (Angelus Silesius)

Someone knocks on God’s door. Who’s there? God calls. It is I. Go away says God. Puzzled, the person knocks a second time. Who’s there? Let us in. God flings wide the door. Is this what the mystic Angelus Silesius hints at? Or St Paul’s I live yet not I but Christ liveth within me? This month I touch on what has intrigued mystics, philosophers and poets across millennia – and now neuroscientists. The paradox, ambiguity and illusion of the first-person singular. Their insights allude to how we spend a lifetime thinking with
and about the I when there isn’t one. Knotting the rope that binds. Creating a theatre of the absurd.

http://dorianhaarhoffblog.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Nov-2024-letter.pdf

Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
Alain de Botton

Last year I offered a storyshop to the Soul Carers network in Cape Town. This month I’d like to share extracts from this novel related to their work as death doulas. Clover Brooks ushers people peacefully through their last days, collecting their final words into three notebooks: ADVICE,

CONFESSIONS and REGRETS.
The book offers profundity through simplicity, on the other side of complexity. As a young girl, Clover ends up living with a grandfather who teaches her that curiosity and observation are as important as imagination. Ironically, while she’s studying thanatology in Japan, looking at how different cultures handle death, the old man dies.

http://dorianhaarhoffblog.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Oct-2024-letter.pdf

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.

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

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