Discovered today, written on April 8th, 2020
All life is encounter. I recall writing about this insight a few years ago, inspired by Martin Buber’s I and Thou: crystallized from it within my own understanding..
Crystallization: a word with meanings in cookery, chemistry and, according to Stendhal, the process of falling in love, as written up in his book De l’Amour, and put into context by this Wikipedia article.
In the simplified world of my current indwelling and perception, everything is contained in four pronouns: You, I, We, and They.
You is my beloved—in flesh and blood, and/or a personification of the unknown God.
I is the centre of awareness: this eye, which is drawn to the real by desire, sometimes seduced by the imaginary.
We is the product of unconditional love, the uniting into a single entity which transcends all differences and separations. My interpretation of We is a three-in-a-bed triangle, where Love is not what you and I created but the great sacramental blessing that was given to us, an embodiment of God, equivalent to the Christian Eucharist
They is the collection of all the disparate elements, real and imagined, that I’m unable to embrace with unconditional love, by reason of their foreignness.
Does any of this extend beyond my little urban cottage to the wide world?
“Ubuntu ngumtu ngabanye abantu” (“A person is a person through other people”).
This draft is as far as I got, that was on 4th April & I’ve been avoiding any revisit since. Much too condensed, I’m sure, but a delight to share with any reader of this site who happens along.
a wayfarer’s notes 