Catching Fire

Recently, we interviewed Donagh O’Shea for our podcast. Donagh is a pottery teacher and leads workshops on how to play with clay—which are just as much about how to become more present in, more sensitive to, the living moment.

Donagh’s also an accomplished author, and his books on spirituality weave effortlessly through references to Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart and John Scotus Eriugena, as well as to Taoist and Buddhist sages from throughout the centuries. I love Donagh’s writing—despite its vast scope it’s always relaxed, unpretentious, warm, witty, and deeply personal. But more than that, his work speaks in a sort of patois of spiritual styles, working against any notion that there is a single “correct method” to faith. His extensive experience of creative play (and leading others to play) with clay gives him a refreshing humility; he exudes the calm and clarity of a space where harsh words and even harsher opinions and divisions fall away, replaced by everything we Rescapers value: curiosity, community, creativity.      

Donagh told us that his discovery of clay coincided with a certain disillusionment he experienced with regard to intellectual life; he’d started to feel “like a head on legs running from library to library,” disconnected from his physical reality. His focus on physical/manual play doesn’t mean he doesn’t value words, of course. But even as a writer, one of his most striking gifts is for metaphor. In metaphor, words are at their most powerful by virtue of connecting themselves to concrete realities. In metaphor we straddle worlds, layers of meaning, or, perhaps more prosaically, different regions of the brain. Poetry is perhaps our best method of reaching from the argument-oriented, logical mind to the wide-open regions of the imagistic, emotional, revelatory right-brain—that place that seems to dwell in an eternal Now, and which is the home of so much aesthetic and spiritual intuition.

I’m struck by an overlap between much of what Donagh says about clay play and what another podcast guest, the dancer Almog Loven, said about the end of failure: once you are open to the moment, and your spontaneous engagement with whatever your art/play is in that moment, then the perfectionist fixation on getting things “right” just might fall away into silence, at least for a time. Whether we are poets, yogis, dancers, or sculptors—or humans trying to improve at the roles of spouse, parent, neighbour, etc.—there is a strange paradox at work here in the notion that we can get things “right” or “wrong.”     

To illustrate, let’s consider the poem Donagh mentioned in his conversation with us: 

    As Kingfishers Catch Fire

    by Gerard Manley Hopkins

    As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

    As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

    Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

    Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

    Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

    Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

    Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

    Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

    I say móre: the just man justices;

    Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

    Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —

    Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

    Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

    To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

    Hopkins is a poet of dazzling invention and skill, but his work can strike people as alien or difficult at first read. I could go on for some time about the verbal inventiveness here, but without turning this into an English lit class, just know this is a Petrarchan sonnet, which means it has two stanzas: an eight-line verse followed by a six-line verse. The first verse sets up an idea or question, and then there’s a “volta”—a turn or twist in the thinking or emotion. So what is the first verse getting at?

    We see the natural world bursting into enhanced life. Everything suddenly becomes more real. The already-vivid kingfisher strikes to catch its prey, and transforms into a blur of energy, as do the petrol-coloured wings of the dragonfly. From images we move to sounds: stones tossed over the edge of a well “ring” out on the way down. Strings and bells also vibrate in their special registers; each mortal thing announces its unique existence. Hopkins sees every object housing a “being indoors” (inside itself) and this thing is, magically, a verb. It selves itself. He has the objects proclaim: “I came into being to selve myself—to be utterly me and me alone.” We are teleported into a universe where everything—even a stone flung down a well, or a bell ringing—is alive with one-of-a-kind identity.

    But then the volta comes, and things turn even stranger. In Hopkins’ poem, if stones have a self, then what transformation might come over humans? Again, the transfiguration comes from a noun (a man) becoming a verb: the just man justices. The mortal human becomes an aspect of the godhead, the ultimate vibrational reality that “plays in ten thousand places.” The human realizes that he or she is non-dual with something much vaster. They too catch fire in a way, a fire of immense cosmic energy, dancing in their every feature and action: “lovely in limbs.” The person’s eyes are not just their eyes, but the eyes of a deity looking out through their eyes, and dwelling in every feature of their face. They are human and not human, mortal and immortal.

    For me, a question hangs over this poem, much as it does over my reading of Zen stories, or Taoist stories: How can one fail to be this enlightened being? How can we fail to be one with the Tao, or fail to be Buddha mind? How do we fail to feel this “fire” that is selving itself in us and in all things? Hopkins doesn’t say, and yet we know what it’s like to feel alone, to sense that life is dull, or ugly, or pointless. In short, we know what it’s like to see existence as the opposite of play, but instead some drab chore we’re stuck with—a series of dead objects (and objectives) we need to sweat at moving around and processing. (Robbie and I call it the Rut, but you might have your own term for it.) I suppose, in the Rut, we don’t feel unique, or if we do, that uniqueness doesn’t feel valuable or interesting. Nothing is alive; it’s just stuff, taking up space or causing traffic delays. In such a mindset, if we were to describe ourselves as a verb, it wouldn’t be a “justicing” but rather a “just-ing” as in “Damn, it’s just Monday.” There’s no sense of being a part of a great mystery, or an infinite source of energy.
The paradox that Zen, Taoist, Christian, and really all mystics grapple with is what to do with this suffering. Is it part of the great game of figuring out what you are? Or is it needless confusion? Can one overcome it—and if so, do we only get glimpses of escape, or can we slip the Rut forever?

 These are big questions, and only the unique self that is reading this can come to their own thoughts on the matter. But for what it’s worth, we urge you if you feel like you live in a cold or uncaring universe to move closer to sources of warmth. Wherever you find beauty, or people actively transforming themselves (via art or play) from nouns into verbs, you are inching closer to the great Fire, that source of energy that makes even the stones ring as they fall.