The wisdom of the people9 who live close to the earth and who live by the measure of the sun and the seasons chooses to speak with words in a particular order and of an order of gravity seldom if ever used by city dwellers of today.
What words they say and how they say them are surprising to us. They catch our attention with their disarming plain factual truths. The words they speak often shine a light on our everyday with a brightness that brings us directly back to our perceptions of the everyday and bathes the dull way we live and speak in a refreshing glow of solemn beauty.
Their vision is lucid, because their needs are met on paths of least resistance connected to their own survival. And their need to survive with honour and with dignity is something they express and celebrate without pride or vainglory.
They regard themselves as one group of beings among other kinds of beings, both animate and inanimate. For these peoples, it is self-evident that they live by the exact same laws of the sanctity of life as each of the other groups. They apply to themselves rules that life itself lays down and they do not regard them as either better or worse, but valid according to their patterns of need.
There are the nomadic people, the people in our cities who exist in the unseen margins, the subsistence communities, those groups who still live with minimal contact with the world of the twentieth century. All of these are people who preserve ways of seeing and saying which are remarkable for their lack of artifice, embellishment, overtones or undertones of meaning.
They speak words in harmonious combination, which I, a lifelong city dweller, recognise as expressions of a reality without distraction and interference, refined always with compassion, dignity and above all humility by the immediate imperatives of daily living.
And I willingly concede that in my daily life I have lost touch with much of their valuable experience. Whenever I’m privileged to hear their speech, I gratefully receive the clarity of expression, the innate wisdom, and the suddenly obvious commonsense in the logic of thought.
Massive stones and great circles
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Deeply engaged EveryNow
The View at 72+ 