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Excerpted Inspirations #241

  • Writer: Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
    Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
  • 7 days ago
  • 0 min read
[Continued from last week] [Adam and Vicky continue their discussion on the beach about life and death.] “Okay, here’s another analogy. Where are you when you write poetry?” “This summer I’m usually up in the loft.” “You know that’s not what I mean. When you’re actually writing a poem, when you’re in the middle of it, where are you?” “I’m not sure. I’m more in the poem than I am in me. I’m using my mind, really using it, and yet I’m not directing the poem or telling it where to go. It’s telling me.” His strong fingers moved gently across my hair. “That’s the way it is with science, too. All great scientists, like Newton, like Einstein, repeat the same thing – that the discoveries don’t come when you’re consciously looking for them. They come when for some reason you’ve let go conscious control. They come in a sudden flash, and you can receive that flash, or you can refuse to. But if you’re willing to receive it, then for that instantaneous moment of time you’re really you, but you’re not conscious in the same way you’ll have to be later on when you look at what you saw in the flash, and then have to work out the equations to prove it.” I heard every word he said. And I think I understood. At the same time my entire body was conscious of the feel of his fingers stroking my hair. I wondered if he felt it as strongly as I did. But I asked, “Has that happened to you, that knowing in a flash?” “Not in the way it did to Einstein, with his theory of relativity. Or to Dr. O’Keefe, with his work on limb regeneration. But in little ways with Basil, yes. He’s taught me more about himself than I could have learned with just my thinking self. And Basil – Basil has taught you too, hasn’t he?” “Yes. Oh, yes.” He lifted his hand and stopped stroking. “And you saw Jeb with Ynid.” Yes, I had seen Dr. Nutteley with Ynid. In the midst of his pain, Jeb had been wholly real. “What I think” – Adam’s hand began caressing my hair again – “is that if we’re still around after we die, it will be more like those moments when we let go, than the way we are most of the time. It’ll be – it’ll be the self beyond the self we know.” At that moment there was a rip in the clouds and an island of star-sparkled sky appeared, its light so brilliant it seemed to reach down beyond the horizon and circle the earth, a ring of pure and endless light. I wasn’t sure that Adam’s words were comforting. But his arm around me was. He made me feel very real, not replete with me at all, only real, and hopeful. -Madeleine L’Engle, A Ring of Endless Light (1980), pp. 162-164

 
 
 
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