When I consider what I might claim as a belief, I ask myself, on the most basic level, what it is that I believe to be experiencing? What do I understand to be going on around me? How can I arrive at the statement of “this I believe”?
So much of my experience in life has felt as though the world was turned up to a volume far beyond comfort. I am among the many people who have wondered whether life was worth living. And when the onslaught of life’s stimulations threaten to drown me, I can become quickly overwhelmed.
Then I remember the words Annie Dillard used to open her meditations on what she called “The Writing Life.” She wrote: “You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.”
I believe this, so I’ll start there.
Whatever I believe is rooted in my experience of the world. I encounter and interpret billions of pieces of information, both consciously and non-conscoiusly. And my experience is utterly inseverable from every member of my species and all the rest of the “more-than-human” world. I watch the innumerable expressions of life around me coming and going like algae blooms. They move through their fleeting seasons: emerging, presenting, declining, disappearing, reintegrating.
I come up against the inevitability of change and the limits of our agency. I feel the power of deeply-felt truths, pushing and pulling at me like an ocean, while life’s insistence is suspended throughout the watery matrix.
Often, when I am with groups of people, I glimpse the budding and blooming of life’s expression. Life makes itself known, encounters the contradictions of life together, and then dies as quickly as it came. It is as though I am watching a timelapse film of a field of wildflowers. And I know that it is among them that I belong.
The idea of stating my beliefs feels a bit foolish in this experience of life. I sometimes fear that my own contradictions will expose a lack of cohesion in my personhood. It’s funny that my finite mind should be embarrassed by one of its most defining characteristics.
But as many people have noted, we seek cohesive stories that will make sense of the swirling contradictions of life. I find great grounding in Walt Whitman’s response to all of this. He writes, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself (I am large. I contain multitudes).”
I believe that, too. I am large. I contain multitudes.
When Whitman wrote that he contained multitudes I think he was also directing our attention to the stunning reality that our neighbors, too, contain multitudes. I imagine thousands, perhaps millions, of threads reaching out from me in every direction as I stand here. Each of my multitudes connected to those of all of you, stretching as far as life can reach. I see the same for each of you.
Zoom out from this and the fine grains of connection melt into a liquid, a cloud, a great teeming sea of interconnection. The bubble and splat of life. I see again the primordial soup from which our species is forever a kind of algae bloom working to become. We are working to become what time and space suggest may give us better life.
Then I remember the words of Annie Dillard again: “You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.”
I believe this, so I’ll continue.
I confess that I find it absolutely astonishing that through all our complexity, traveling as multitudes of multitudes, that we are still able to somehow understand one another, even a little. It is miraculous to me that we can make some sense of all these threads, this murky stew. I am moved by our ability to improve our experiences by cooperating across the persuasive illusion of independence.
I am thrown to the ground in humility before the improbability of my consciousness in such a vast and demanding universe. I come to that consciousness among life’s efforts to respond to the suggestions of time and space.
And what do I hear? What are time and space suggesting may lead to better life?
Time tells me to give attention, to notice, to watch. Time tells me that all things change. That there is no controlling or predicting the exact outcomes of any series of actions. That the experience of time itself is uneven and untamable. I see that we can learn to live with greater contentment, and to do so expands our agency within the time we’re granted.
Space, this, here between us, and far beyond, shows me the abundance we have in a world that often feels defined by scarcity. If time is telling me to give attention, space is telling me to fill out into the full shape that I am becoming. That we are becoming.
Space, both near and far, testifies to the abundance of the universe. When I feel that this indescribably vast galaxy somehow strains at the size of my needs, my mind and body take refuge in the spaciousness implied by the multitudes we each contain.
There’s room enough for all. And in the cosmic muck of life together we share the possibility of great joy when we embrace our ultimate entanglement. I hear Robin Wall Kimmerer’s simple and profound summary – “All flourishing is mutual.”
As I make sense of the great stir of experience, the flows of meaning-making that pass through my boundaries, shaping my story-seeking, I feel myself arriving. I arrive somewhere like that state in which so many artists do – a hunger to make known that which astonishes me while feasting on that which astonishes you.
So what do I believe?
I start with what is within me and around me.
I believe in the land, the water, the spaciousness; and how they move me.
I believe I am made and set here to give voice to this, my own astonishment. And I believe the same of you.
I believe we contain multitudes.
I believe that all flourishing is mutual.
I believe anything that tempts me to conclude that I can go on without you is a danger to my long term wellbeing. We belong to the multitudes.
When we give voice to our astonishment, when we understand that nothing can sever our futures, when we are humble before our multitudinal experiences; mutual flourishing becomes possible. And that, for me, is worth staying alive for.
This I believe.