Medium Short: Fallen blossom flies
Spiritual syntax revisited
Welcome to the latest Medium Short, a weekly accountability practice highlighting what I’m up to along the unmarked trail towards #IndustrialHealing. Reminder: all my Medium articles are linked for free here.
A thousand years ago, I majored in religious studies at university. This entailed a whole heap of things, many of which I’m only now coming to grasp. One thing that I delighted in then, and which feels pertinent today, is a haiku by the Japanese poet Arakida Moritake (1473–1549). Moritake’s poem was a guiding force this week.
A fallen blossom
returning to the bough, I thought —
But no, a butterfly.
There are many translations of this poem (the above is by Steven D. Carter). Each version reminds me of that threshold we cross unexpectedly, with reoriented understanding on things minute and massive.
I experience this as a kind of upgraded spiritual syntax, where a newly recognized pattern or rule-set governing the world around me is at long last snapped into place. To take the language analogy a step further, it’s as if I could “speak the language” well enough before crossing this threshold, but without realizing it (beyond a nagging feeling of not fully comprehending) I wasn’t…
