Collecting Shards #1: Tension of the Opposites

Well, hello everyone.

A couple years back, I began work on a rather monumental idea for a book project (affectionately named Paola) that very much sought me out, not the other way around. Start here:

Welcome to my — as yet unnamed — book project.

Read along as I unfurl my biggest creative project ever in real (slow) time.

Synaesthete MediaLauren Crabbe

To summarise super quick, Paolo Coelho’s worldly masterpiece The Alchemist danced within my orbit in a wholly unexpected way over a decade-long period, and once the book got into my hands, began to instruct and inform my life’s unique path, tune my moral and spiritual compass, in a way that no other material has.

This divine entanglement — and I realise how eye-rollingly fluffy it sounds to say that, but truly what it is — set off a low-key obsession with not only studying The Alchemist cover-to-cover a bunch of times…but then looking up and recognising, with a gasp, that I was now sitting in a luscious garden, spilling over with fruits and flowing waters and roots and grasses and gleaming stones and bejewelled butterflies that were the interconnected treasures of wisdom, inspiration, and instruction embedded everywhere in the world around me, which continue to re-wild my life with a personal narrative that feels more authentic, inimitable, and meaningful by the day.

It was a beautiful, intentional process that lent some critical support to a then-life situation that was otherwise falling to pieces, and no longer felt like my own. It was a series of flint strikes in the dark that baited me with hope that there would soon be a roaring fire again — warmth and light and peace and purpose.

And it led me to amass a Smaug’s bounty of treasures in the form of words, foraged notes and thoughts, and rigorous research on all manner of interrelated topics and philosophies that, at approximate last count, numbered over 300,000.

Which I now have to sift through; carve a clearer path beyond the initial how and why that I’m doing this, what it’s all for.

Hwhich, naturally, has got me a touch worked up and overwhelmed. This is the most amount of writing I have done in service of this project for months, when a year or so back, I couldn’t stop looking at the world through my alchemist lens and adding kindling to the hearth, like a fricking bower bird who only sees blue. Now I have an almighty haystack that requires diligent, tedious sorting before going any further — and do believe that, despite this being the messy case, there is still much of great value I’m just kind of…sitting on, at present, that deserves to circulate while I find my way through.

Which is what leads me to this newsletter.

Why Collecting Shards?

In Susan Cain’s stunning book, Bittersweet, she introduces a metaphor from the Kabbalah — Jewish mystical tradition — that immediately struck my heart and soul upon reading, and has never let me go since.

It’s said that divinity was once one vessel that broke apart and scattered gleaming shards and reflections of itself all across the world we live in, amongst great tragedy and ugliness and imperfection and all the rest we see and feel and process on a daily basis. Thus, a key task for all of us — despite much pain and uncertainty and despair — is to pick up and share those shards wherever we happen to find them.

The ultimate goal not even necessarily being to reach these divine fragments of beauty, meaning, love, and transcendence (though it’s near-miraculous and worthy of celebrating when we do), but to simply live in search; to continually yearn forward in hopes we just might one day find and feel them as deeply and meaningfully as we do our harsher lived realities; to bring about wholeness and unity, piece by elusive piece.

I have accumulated a fair few shards of my own so far — little treasures that would do far better to be shared than hoarded — which, at one point or another in my rudderless life, reflected me in their piecemeal (though no less priceless) divinity, completely altering my course or strengthening me to hold to it.

In fact, I view myself as a kind of story/experience/artefact collector and archivist — a deep listener and near-silent witness to humanity’s hidden beauty (with awareness that I could stand to be a touch less silent).

Therefore, while I decide which will go in my book project next…why not admire their gleam aloud as I’m holding them up to the light?

This series likely won’t follow any particular or special order; merely present what shows itself to be shared at the time of writing. (Possibly one deeper dive per newsletter + little, easily digestible morsels of enjoyment or contemplation, to read as much or as little as you like. Let me know your thoughts!) Which may come across as fragmented…and of course, this is what they are. Divine shards that stand alone, though yearn to be made part of a whole.

(Knowing me, they might also spin out and become entire chapters on their own, so brace yourself.)

This is what I am attempting to do with this project, in service of some kind of imagined greater good. My dream for you is to simply enjoy whatever reflections of yourself and grander beauty you glimpse in my collection…and share your own if you feel so compelled :)

There is a particular phenomenon I used to experience when I travelled;

specifically, to truly far-flung places of the pinch-me kind, about as far from where I came from as I could possibly go. I felt it while walking on foot beside a camel train across the Sahara Desert for three days in Morocco. I felt it while sitting outside a monastery around 12,000ft above sea level in the remote Indian Himalayan region of Spiti Valley. I felt it while taking a wild wee under the stars on a cracked mud flat as far as the eye could see in middle-of-nowhere Mozambique.

These experiences were that of feeling soul-stretched — absolutely beyond myself, my previous limits and known capacities — like a rubber band pulled taut and on the verge of snapping back. (I imagine it’s a bit like what a child feels when they climb a big tree for the first time, overcome by how high they got and awe of the view and giddiness at what they’re going to tell Mum and Dad, before realising they don’t know how to come back down again. Part fear, part shock, part adrenaline, part pure joy.)

On every single occasion I couldn’t begin to tell you, anybody else, or even myself how the hell I got there in the first place; floating on waves of accident after accident, steered by dumb luck alone, or perhaps by a god I’m certain gets drunk and bored sometimes. I was often damn near broke, riding my health a little too close to the edge, sometimes heartbroken or ashamed of something I was running from…with absolutely no fucking clue of what would be waiting for me when I did finally snap back into the strange world of daily living. No “real world” prospects to speak of, since I often sold my stuff and quit jobs and moved out of houses before going travelling, occasionally broke off a relationship.

I was perpetually, purposefully, neither here nor there. By modernity’s judgmental standards…I had just as good as fallen through the cracks. I believed it myself — it used to keep me awake sometimes, or sucker-punch me during acid trips after returning to the normality I was supposed to have figured out by now.

And yet: in the suspense of that stretch-place, in between here and there…I was happy. Euphorically, blissfully, boundlessly happy. More than happy; to adopt a phrase from The Perks of Being a Wallflower: I was infinite.

Everything and everywhere at the same time, therefore nothing and nowhere, fully enmeshed with all of it. Never so close while feeling so far away. The most “home”, furthest from home. The most me, wildly different to where I’d been and what I’d been before.

If there were ever a sensation I could bottle, it would be that one (as I have rarely experienced it before or since) — it may well be the elixir of life.

For whatever reason, when I wrote my prologue chapters, I failed to mention this very phenomenon that set me off on a book writing journey in the first place, before The Alchemist even entered the equation. But my curiosity for understanding exactly what it was — this near-indescribable, utterly enigmatic feeling (and why I seemed to live so wholly and fatalistically for it, craving it, yet rarely finding it) — led me to view it in terms of a kind of going away/coming home[^ A snappier name for which I am still figuring out.]cycle: a paradox of somehow being at home while away, and yearning for that stretchiness once more whenever I did finally return to actual “home”.

Which led me to start writing about it, to try and understand it even more. Which then opened up a cavernous archive in my psyche, for all manner of synchronistic books and texts and talks and teachings — with their limitless possible answers to my newfound area of interest — to line the shelves.

Just one of them (I introduce to you today since it is very connected to the above) being Women Who Run with the Wolves: a collection of foraged stories, myths, and fairy tales from cultures around the world, with extensive commentary, by Jungian psychologist and writer Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés.

I am indebted to Dr. Estés, first of all, because she introduced me to what she calls the Life/Death/Life cycle; the definition of which she carries throughout her entire book and would be too lengthy to unpack completely right now. But to me, it embodies the essence of what I have instinctively chanced upon myself with “going away/coming home”: extending beyond oneself to live more fully, collapsing in on oneself to allow certain overextended parts of ourselves to die, and gathering the courage to go back out there again with what we have lost, learned, and then regained.

Life and death and life again (followed by yet more death again). And around and around we go. Everything we learn and experience and accumulate becomes compost, becomes a tree, eventually births a forest.

Not to mention countless other revelations I encountered while combing the pages of Women/Wolves. However, the one, surprisingly simple, that may have answered my above question — as to why I throw myself into absurd external circumstances and catapult back in a crumpled heap in order to better know myself…and appear to masochistically enjoy the process, despite the figurative and occasional literal crippling — however, is this.

From page 426, Estés’ introduction of Carl Jung’s “tension of the opposites” in her re-telling of a tale called The Handless Maiden:

“It is an odd time, a paradoxical time, for we are above ground, and yet below ground. We are wandering, yet we are loved. We are not rich, yet we are fed…The theme of being so without, and yet so sustained, continues. Even though we wander about in an unwashed, forlorn, semi-blinded and handless state, a great force from the Self can love us, and hold us to its heart.”

Being “in between” — a border-dweller, neither here nor there — perhaps points to this literal tension that Jung describes; in Estés’ words, “wherein something from each pole of the psyche is constellated at one time, creating new ground.”

And I don’t know about you, but…when I create or cover new ground, I get excited. Really excited. Elated, ecstatic, even. Seen, made sense of. I begin to understand that whatever wild, nonsensical thing I am doing, wherever I am — however lost and cast out I may be while doing it; however my inner Devils might be trying to lead me off-track — at last has a purpose, some method in the madness, a rhyme and reason to it. My life leading up to that point is not amounting to nothing; not wasted. The confusion and tension and struggle all mean something in the end, and my stray pieces fall into life’s wider puzzle. Everything in its right place, so says Radiohead.

We can be safe, and we can come home — to the throne of the Self; emphasised in the story by the kindly, centred king who falls in love with the handless maiden and vows to take lifelong care of her — even after we have drifted very far away (literally and figuratively).

After all, we have likely all found ourselves in some kind of “wandering, handless state” at one time or another (or many), which greater society/culture has a tendency to make us feel is decidedly not okay to be in. And when that happened, when we were unwittingly exposed in our fleshiest, most vulnerable states we might sooner have joined a witness protection program before showing other people…

couldn’t we all have been shown (or shown ourselves) a touch of extra mercy and grace? A loving hand on our heart, a squeeze around our shoulders to let us know we’re not alone on this endless search through life for a sense of acceptance and wholeness — some kind of completion — and don’t have to carry the weight of the world as a consequence for not fitting seamlessly into it?

So maybe this is a real thing, a legit psychological and spiritual element I was tuning into:

My first real experiences of finding True, Unconditional Love within myself, even in uncharted territory, against the grain of a life that found ways to let me know time and time again just how much I didn’t appear to belong to it.

This elusive feeling I described at the start, that of being “soul-stretched,” served as much proof as any that this simply was not true…that I was loved, fed, and sustained as as any other on earth, even when without bearings.

Especially when without bearings.

“People may ask for evidence, for proof of her existence. They are essentially asking for proof of the psyche. Since we are the psyche, we are also the evidence. Each and every one of us is evidence of not only Wild Woman’s existence, but of her condition in the collective. We are the proof of this ineffable female numen. Our existence parallels hers.”

Smaller shards capturing my heart right now:

➺ A song: “The Missing Road” — Radical Face.

This beauty has popped up in my shuffle a couple times lately and stopped me in my tracks, though I particularly enjoyed it this morning while microdosing psilocybin and wandering around the ancient rainforest reserve of Mary Cairncross Park in Maleny, Queensland, conversing with birds and trees and pademelons and the like.

(Linking to Deezer, a Spotify-alternative platform with better sound quality and artist compensation, a CEO that doesn’t bankroll violence, and AI-attribution for identifying what was created by a real human or not…just in case you’re thinking of making the switch. ;))

➺ A fun personal factoid (relevant to today’s deep dive):

I get weird little rolls going with repetitive numbers — spirit numbers, if you don’t mind a touch of woo. Lately, I have been getting stalked by 42s in particular and variations of it, and wondering what they could possibly be pointing at.

This overarching concept and unpacking of this particular symbology within the story of The Handless Maiden begins on page 424; a section of Women/Wolves I only started reading at this particular time because I woke with a jolt at…11:42pm, for no clear reason (though I was wracked with insomnia at the time in general) after a dream in which I “felt” the presence of something in the room with me.

I never considered the significance of the number 42 until a support work client of mine got me obsessed with it, and a cursory glance of the interwebs tells us the number in steeped in rich historical association — anything from the ancient Egyptians to Chinese numerology to the Bible, from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to philosophy;

some phrases I really enjoyed and resonated with: “…the search for meaning and complexities inherent in the human quest for understanding…a representation of the infinite questions that arise in the pursuit of knowledge, embodying the journey rather than the destination…guiding seekers through the labyrinth of philosophical thought towards a greater comprehension of existence” — pointing at self-realisation, life purpose, harmony betwixt the material and spiritual realms, cosmic balance, and more.

Anyone else get this?

➺ A littler read I liked lately: the “Why You” digest of The Marginalian newsletter (highly recommend subscribing for anybody who is particularly spiritually/philosophically/poetically minded; a “long-form” kind of human).

It's a dissection of the concept of “self” in relation to love, through the dichotomy of Eastern versus Western culture, science, and the curated perspectives of visionaries like Iris Murdoch and Blaise Pascal. An excerpt:

“There is no reason for you to be here, to be you. But perhaps what is left in the wake of reason is love — the matter, the substance of us that over and over outweighs the antimatter of chance to make life tremble with aliveness. Like life itself, love is an affirmation of the improbable nested, always nested, in the possible.”

➺ A gentle plea for the times: Cut ties with OpenAI.

This article here from The Guardian explains its connection with not only MAGA but ICE as well, its attempts to undercut AI regulation — and how when Trump ordered AI companies to provide unrestricted access to their technology, Sam Altman of OpenAI quietly fell in line (when those behind Anthropic/Claude refused, and were swiftly punished for it).

It takes mere seconds to delete one’s ChatGPT account; and if you wish to still keep using an LLM, consider Claude instead, or another taking a principled stance against the violation of people’s rights.

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