Signifying Everything
Some thoughts on gravity and levity...
You have everything you need to be happy within you already.
It was one of those dreams, where a crystal voice of clarity breaks through the fog and density, rapping you on the skull and demanding that you pay attention.
You have everything you need, it repeated. Then with a smile I could hear, it added, You’re just tired.
You’re right, I responded. I am tired! I’m tired! And I continued to exclaim about how tired I was until I woke from that particular nap.
I’ve been trying to write this particular update for a few weeks two months now, attempting to ease back into a sustainable use of Substack. But people, I’ve got to be honest: every time I’m signing on lately, I’m getting fed a bunch of really heavy stuff. Everything is so serious: education, religion, current events. Even the pretty nature accounts I follow are laced with an apocalyptic doom: Save the bees… or else! I love bees. I want to save them all! But it all reminds me of how I came home from school in first grade hysterical about the rain forests, and my poor mother had to figure out how to talk me off the edge of the cliff.
I still care very much about the rain forests, forests in general actually, but unfortunately it’s all far outside my sphere of influence. All of this stuff is, because I’m a genuine, class-A nobody. And the stuff that is within my own sphere of influence? Damn if it doesn’t get heavy enough on its own. If I am tempted to squander the energy of my caring on things outside my sphere, I’m left with far too little to make good actions within it. I’m willing to bet you have the same problem. So I’m guessing I’m not the only person who logs onto Substack, sighs at the gravity of it all, then switches over to Reddit to laugh at animals being derps and chuckle at silly comments.
The internet is fairyland, and that metaphor is life-changing. With this model, I can admit to you that I love fairyland-- that I take little trips here when my day-to-day gets a little heavy, that when I’m careful with it, it offers me joys and delights. And also that sometimes I get snared in things unseelie and come back to life with a little bit of spacey enchantment clinging like cobwebs to my head.
When I first started writing “for real”-- after Sasha and the Dragon was accepted for publication and I realized I might actually be able to do this thing-- I made myself a promise. I promised that I would not contribute to the noise. I would not write publicly just to churn out content, or pretend that my pen was a goose that would lay me golden eggs. Fairyland is everything but quiet, and King Solomon had it pegged when he noted a few millenia ago that there is nothing new under the sun. I’m not going to write on everything I get a craving to write about because cravings must always be encountered with the space and time of discernment.
How do we integrate all of these impulses, so many of which pull us in opposite directions, stretched out on the rack of conflicting desires? So often it feels like the hunger for sincerity and growth is at odds with the longing for release and happiness, but this I know is a false dichotomy. The true work is the hard work of holding both at the same time, to greater reality and intensity, as much as it can be borne. To stand at the abyss and drink a cup of tea.
Do you know George MacDonald’s fairytale The Light Princess? It’s a story about how light-heartedness without gravity is stunted growth, and how love as a state of being needs weight and self-sacrifice in order to bring life.
It’s a beautiful and moving story, to be sure. But I’ve always felt that MacDonald only told half of the story, or at the very least he didn’t spell everything out for us. Yes, certainly, we need gravitas, sincerity, emotional weight-- all of these faces of the diamond. But we also need levity and lightheartedness, because without those things our Christian joy is a lie. Be of good cheer, Christ tells us. Wash your faces when you fast. Don’t be mopey, I’ve already won the war. And later, St. Paul rolls his eyes at our Pharisaical gravity and admonishes us that if Christ isn’t risen, we’re a bunch of idiots.
You see, the mistake is in thinking that gravity and levity, sadness and joy, are poles on the same spectrum. So if you’re grieving, you can’t be happy; if you’re laughing, you can’t be serious. In reality these things are two different spectra. One’s sadness and gravity is not actually linked to one’s joy and levity, and in fact, one can be intensely both at the same time. At least that has been my lived experience. It was such a relief to find Kamizierz Dabrowski (have you seen my recent release over at Patterns for Life? I dig into Dabrowski a little bit in a talk I gave at last year’s Orthodoxy and Education conference)-- even more than Jung, Dabrowski articulated how intensity of personal experience is not of necessity neurotic, but rather, that intensity and inner conflict is the prime mechanism for internal growth. Need as sidequest for the summer? Dabrowski’s a fun one.
We need both our gravity and our levity-- in heaps and spades-- to really grow. Nurturing one at the expense of the other just doesn’t work well.
How do you nurture both in your own lived experience? One of the ways I do this is by adjusting my reading. In times of greater gravity, I lean on those works that bring me joy, and in times of greater leisure I pursue the more serious. Thus it is that recently, I’m returning to books that have soothed my heart, and it is these works that I will be writing about this summer, exploring the ways story can integrate both gravity and levity in ways that heal our own fractured experiences.
The very first book that comes to mind that injects me with healing electricity is The Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder. This is a book of ecstasy, of the dimensionality that becomes possible in the intersection of gravity and levity.
When you ask me what my five desert island books are, I can usually narrow it down to thirty or forty contenders (Does a series count as one book? Do you bring a book you love so much you have it memorized? What’s more important on a desert island: characters or ideas?), but The Solitaire Mystery is my automatic number two, right after the obligatory Bible. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read it.
This spring, I had the most profound joy of reading it aloud to my kids for the first time, and the even more mind-obliterating delight of watching them react to the story in the same way I do. There were moments in this read aloud that I read a passage, set the book down on the table, and we all just sat there in silent contemplation; often enough, I had tears streaming down my cheeks. (My kids are used to this by now, and they wait patiently until I can clear the lump from my throat and continue reading...)
What in the world makes this book so special?
Well, I already told you a little bit about why I love Gaarder. Last time I mentioned The Orange Girl and Sophie’s World, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t also recommend his other works. The Christmas Mystery, for example, is a philosophical book about liturgical time travel! You’d think that loving an author so much, I’d have all his titles under my belt-- but the truth is that the rarefied air of just one of his novels can keep me flying for quite a long time. To binge read all of that glory just wouldn’t be right for me.
So why is this one my favorite? Sophie’s World is more well known, and a great book, but it’s primarily about the world of philosophical ideas. The Solitaire Mystery is all about what it means to live life with the heart of a philosopher, to be rooted in an unshakeable sense of awe and wonder that permeates every layer of our lives. It’s a book about being awake in a world of sleepers; about being a joker in a pack of cards.
I hesitate to tell you too much about it, because it begs to be experienced for itself. I will tell you that it is a delightfully layered story within a story within a story within a story, that it treats in destiny and family curses, and that you will never, ever look at a pack of cards casually ever again. The Solitaire Mystery touches on the mysteries of both creation and subcreation, on the driving powers of the human imagination and the human heart, and what it means to live life fully awake and crystal-clear sober.
Perhaps more than anything, The Solitaire Mystery is a fairytale, in the best possible senses of the word. It is accessible at almost all ages (I admit that my five-year old slid down to the carpet for his Lego set pretty quickly, but I also must note that he played quietly). It has layers of meaning to unpack, all wrapped up in a story with a clear message and trajectory, that can be encountered and re-encountered to deeper benefit. It’s not preachy at all, though it talks about some pretty convicting themes and invites the reader into acts of moral courage. And most importantly, it is so full of magic that that magic can’t help but immediately spill out into your lived life.
The high you get from works like this is so much better than drugs, I swear it. Drugs and booze just mimic the chemicals that make you feel a certain way, an overloud jangling and clattering of nerves and synapses devoid of meaning, signifying nothing. They are the cravings of the idiot, full of sound and fury.
When you find the way to see reality, though, to behold the cosmos in this particular way that turns a meaningless maze, that rat race made real, into a glorious labyrinth to endlessly explore, you tap into all the true reasons why this bodily feeling exists for us to experience.
But, you know, after the ecstasy, the laundry.1 And we’ll be laughing while we fold!
Housekeeping
Here’s what’s coming up on dephilosophize me this summer:
A four or five part long-form write up on a particular creative work that has been part of my life since I was six. I just had the amazing opportunity to meet and speak with the authors, and I’m rereading the series with some insider knowledge that is blowing my mind.
A series of shorter, focused pieces on other books and media (yes, I’m going to include MLP:FiM) that I’ve recently thought about that have contributed to integrating sincerity and joy in my own embodied life. They make me happy.
A unique think-piece, co-written with one of my readers, on a particular danger of fairyland we’ve been emailing back and forth about. What started out as a simple exchange has continued to evolve into something really interesting, and I can’t wait to share it with you.
In addition, we missed the deadline to launch my new children’s book in the Paschal season, but that’s alright! It’s in layout now and looks fantastic, plus we’ve started the administrative work on developing the Kickstarter launch. I can’t wait for you to see it!
Finally, the biggest reason I haven’t been writing here as much is because I’ve been devoting more attention to my magical/spiritual realism series. I have two books nearly complete, and am hard at work on the third.
Thank you so much for your ear. I hope this little corner of fairyland helps you find both gravity and levity, and I wish you all the most glorious midsummer.
Warmly,
Laura
Buddhist aphorism and title of a book by Jack Kornfield! I was introduced to him through Dr. Mark Epstein’s fabulous The Trauma of Everyday Life.
You’ve given such a compelling review of The Solitaire Mystery, I had to order it immediately ❤️
It sounds like we are both going through a complex process of discernment around the work of writing, writing for publication, and writing for the internet (in some senses three wholly separate things). I resonate enormously with your sentiments especially near the the top of this piece. I have for quite some time been pondering whether authors like us have some kind of responsibility to try and have an impact, or whether that should just not be our problem at all and we should just write when we have something meaningful to share and leave the rest up to the Lord or the forces of the market or whatever is running the show out there.
Unfortunately the endless demands for content of the internet have made the question both much more important and much harder to answer. In a world where even traditional book publishers often expect us to be building followings of tens of thousands is there any space left for slower voices--people who don't just pour out their immediate take on every possibly thing all the time but perhaps have something very significant to share if they can be given the time to be quiet first? I love what you say about needing to learn the skill of *not* just following the impulse to write something. We *must* seek that for a healthy soul, and yet success in the market demands the complete opposite. How much of ourselves are we meant to give in order to try and offer something Good to the world?
I think we are kindred spirits in facing this. Will pray for you, Laura.