re-imagine and re-story your life and work

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

Igno van Niekerk and Tina Konstant (story mates)
kindly recorded the zoom launch. Here tis.
https://mega.nz/file/rg9xhDJa#TTfWT8w-
HttuLtfFbUGH_in-8_LXl8fIBtzE3dDaJiI
Dear writer, storyteller, reader, lover of words,
images, silences…

Thank you for those who have subscribed to the
monthly letter (R240 per annum) I cherish your
support. You can still do so if you wish. The letter
remains open to all.
Why do you live on the bank of the river?’ ‘Because a
poem is a revelation, and it is by the brink of running
water that poetry is revealed to the mind.’
(The Salmon of Knowledge)

Sure they called it Ireland
I wonder what Ireland conjours for you? The country has been in the news,
given the 2023 Rugby World Cup. While I share no blood ties, as it does for
many, Ireland inhabits my psyche and imagination. This month John Gnodde, singer and song writer and I offered a late Sunday sundowner in Pringle Bay.
John’s repertoire included Rare old Times, Molly Malone, Carrickfergus,
Maggie, Wild Rover, Parting Glass and Danny Boy. (a police officer Charlie
MCKenna said ‘Danny Boy to be sung at my funeral mass. If not I’ll get up
and walk out.’)
I interlaced the lyrics with poetry, myth, (Finn McCool and the Salmon of
Knowledge) and excepts from novels. We both sprinkled in the odd classic
Irish mirth. I included stanzas from the Irish greats. (Do yourself a favour
and look up the poems, whole and entire unto themselves)

http://dorianhaarhoffblog.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Nov-2023-letter-1.pdf

Thank you for those who have subscribed to the monthly letter (Aug 23
– July 24 R240) I cherish your support. You can still do so if you wish.
The letter remains open to all.

Although we seem to be separate individuals, in reality we are all
expressions of one primal imagination (Timothy Freke)

One or Two or One-Two?
Living in Pringle Bay in a biosphere brings many blessings. Baboons live
here too and often forage fynbos berries in the village. The odd rogue
can be a food snatcher. A long-lived controversy. Are the baboons
welcome or not? How do we keep our houses safe from rogue baboon
raids?

There are those openly hostile. There are those who welcome and name
these creatures though don’t wish to offer hospitality. So, how does
this difference manifest? It seems the one side might emerge from the
Biblical injunction, that we are lords of creation. Gen. 1 26-31. ‘And
God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let
them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the
air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every
creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.’

The wider view perhaps links us to First Nations such as the Bushman
where we are all one, part of something bigger and that the human
being does not have any elevated status in relation to all the other
fauna and flora. That spirit of life is in everything. We are ecosystem
(echosystem?)

http://dorianhaarhoffblog.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Oct-2023-letter.pdf