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Have you ever viewed one of those YouTube videos called ‘ambience’ videos? There are all kinds, of course. There are the very popular nature sounds: those of the forest, the sea, the lakeside cabin. I recently discovered my favorite ones: ambience videos that recreate a specific historical setting. A scriptorium in a medieval monastery, the interior of an Iroquois longhouse, an Edwardian-era parlour set for tea, a 1920s writer’s den…
These videos are often very impressive in their high degree of historical accuracy and in the attendant sound effects (church bells pealing, farm animals crying, people laughing and chatting…) they recreate to make you feel like you’re right there. Like you’ve time-traveled to a far-away land. Strangely enough, they also make you feel like you’re right at home… Why does this virtual reality appeal to us so much? I think it has something to do with our desire to experience the past as a ‘distant home’, as something which is mysterious and yet very familiar, something which, ultimately, allows us to touch the eternal within our souls. It is a desire we all share, some more than others. For me, this need to immerse myself in the experience of timelessness is very, very strong! It is, I would venture to say, a spiritual need. A spiritual need which informs most everything I do. It is a need which will shape every one of these posts, inviting you to share and participate in a timeless ‘ambience poem’, one which seeks to envelop you in a contemplative and creative mood. My aim is to capture a moment, to try and capture something of the essence of a moment in time as if it were a fine perfume that I wanted to bottle and offer as a gift from me to you. I truly believe that, in the midst of the current upheaval in the world, it is a gift which is precious and vital. So I invite you to make yourself a nice cup of tea, and accompany me on this gentle and meditative journey of discovery…
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One of the biggest losses in modern-day culture is surely the loss of our sense of Time. Of the Past, in particular. Our deep, organic connection to the Past, to Time itself, is rarely mentioned or even acknowledged these days. Something is missing from our conversations. We are constantly told to ‘live in the moment’, ‘embrace the present’, ‘feel the oneness of the universe’ and all that. It is as if we lived suspended in an Eternal Present. It is as if Time itself were broken, irrelevant…
They say that ‘you can’t go home again.’ Yet our ‘Home’ is also the Past. Our ‘home’ is Time itself. It lives, it breathes within us. In the course of writing a first book some three or four years ago, I came across a great many texts about Zen and Buddhist philosophy and culture. That is when I chanced upon an idea, or perhaps what amounted to a spiritual image, of what art and culture could still mean to us, given the chance. Time itself, I learned, is in fact the raw material of Zen art. But the idea was so far removed from what I had always known of our Western ways, so far removed from the ways we seek, in the West, to create meaning in our own lives, that it stopped me dead in my tracks. From there, it took a while for me to understand what that idea actually meant. In this blog, I hope to invite a few “kindred spirits” to accompany me on the journey. I believe that as we are called upon to navigate a cultural, social and political landscape which feels increasingly shadowy, it becomes our life’s work to cast a glance back into the depths of Time in order to make sense of it. And of our own lives. I hope I meet you somewhere along the way. |
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