It’s impossible to describe our experience of reality. We fail to describe even the simplest everyday experience. Try to describe the smell of fresh coffee. It’s.. well.. mm.. nice? You can of course compare coffee to other things and say it smells fruity and a bit like chocolate. But that’s just moving the problem somewhere else, because now you have to describe the smell of chocolate.
It’s impossible to capture the experience of a smell in words. Or, for that matter, any experience. For example, could you describe what the experience of the color blue is like? Without referring to other colors or blue things? Since we can’t even describe simple everyday experiences, I think we can safely say that describing all of reality is completely out of the question. Our clumsy words come nowhere near it.
That’s why sometimes, it’s better to put away the lengthy books for a moment. They can take us further into our heads. Because, we have art! Art is how we express the inexpressible. Through art, we can express what we understand in our hearts to be true, but what we can’t communicate directly. In essence, all forms of authentic art do the same thing, whether it is a poem, a painting, music or something else: they take us home to our true self. They remind us of what we have forgotten.
And by that definition, artists are simply people who have looked deeply into their own hearts and found a way to express what they discovered.
I am in love with metaphors. Like all art forms, a metaphor is never accurate or complete, but it has incredible power to take us home. By pointing us in the right direction. One of my favorite metaphors is the whirlpool in the stream. It’s used to show that all of existence is an indivisible whole. A whirlpool appears to be a separate entity. You can point to it and say, ‘there it is’. But it can never be lifted out of the stream. After all, what is a whirlpool? It’s a movement, that can’t be removed from the water out of which it is made.
In fact, I love this metaphor so much, that one morning, I spontaneously wrote a story about a little whirlpool called Eddy. You can listen to me reading the story that same evening at a Rupert Spira retreat at Mandali.
This unexpected event was the beginning of Big Little Stories: to create simple stories that use metaphors to remind us of what we already know, but have temporarily forgotten.
A good story can skip our heads and go straight to our heart. I once listened to a casual retelling of the wizard of Oz, by Jeff Foster. In this classic story, Dorothy looks for the wizard to tell her the way home, but she doesn’t realize that she had the power to go home at any time. Suddenly and unexpectedly, while hearing this story told live, I was home. My fascination with short stories and metaphors probably began there.