Friday, November 30, 2012

Nurturing Gnosis



I'm in a strange space here having abandoned my blog for seven weeks.  Wow.  I thought it had been a month.  I feel apologetic, but no one out there is complaining.  I reconciled myself (I thought) long ago to the blog-audience-fiction; consequently, to writing for myself, to self-publishing, and to the relative safety of self-criticism.  That's part of nurturing gnosis, perhaps; it's the cut-off from external voices.

Much of this seven weeks has involved intensive writing, and the composing has been on that other side: external audience, publishing, and criticism.  At least the past seventeen days have been because it was on November 12 that I first heard of the Conference on Quantum Storytelling, the first time I'd even heard of "quantum storytelling" for that matter.  And it does matter because "spacetimemattering" came in that window and intersected my self-imposed exile.  That sounds too harsh; maybe I should say that QS and the associated sandwich-word companioned my meditative hermitage.

The right name stays elusive, probably in the chicken-hut zone between the two italicized phrases that contains the tension between want-to and have-to.  I think that's the inn of gnosis-nurturing.  That B&B tends the sense of authentic knowing, of being right on track with "all-I-can-be" or "who-I'm supposed-to-be" and "why-I'm-here."

I've been remembering the long days I sat in Mom's old chair nearer the hearth, alongside Dad in his similar but distinct armchair recliner, in his final days.  I knew they were special then, and I'm appreciating them now for the way our mostly-silent communion confronted those ultimate questions, the ones that often get displaced with busy-ness and distractions.  Nurturing gnosis might mean making time along the way to let the big questions permeate spacetimemattering.

My 25 page, single-spaced, paper for the Conference on Quantum Storytelling goes in today.  I'm thinking this blog might be a space to muse over segments of it.