It often seems that we are the beginning and words follow us. Stands to reason. Words cannot exist without us and only come into being when we will them so.
So what does it mean when words start to take on a life of their own? When they seem to arrive unbidden as we listen to the silence, live through us and then beyond us. This does not conform with our usual way of understanding the world. Nothing much does. Yet it is what happened when The Lifesider Chair appeared in the world.
I was sat on a cushion, which was on a matt, which was lying on thick, rounded-pebble gravel in our back garden. A simple suburban garden in the North of England as real as any mountain top, beach or forest glade. Summer 2022. The gravel, in a circle shape, sits beneath an Acer, a Magnolia and a Cherry tree. All of which have, over the last decade or so, grown wild and untamed, such that they now form an arched canopy. Just tall enough to stand and walk under, on the way to the cushion.
After some time, how long was not clear, nor important, I heard the words that revealed the Lifesider poems to me. I don’t mean that I heard the words with my ears, or that I heard thoughts in the way that I am assuming we all hear thoughts. I heard these words as if spoken by a voice, as clear and resonant as falling water, but not my own. Not through vibrations in the air or those of my own mind but from some other place, in some other way.
‘I am on the side of Life. I am a Lifesider’.
So strange it was to hear this voice that I might have been startled and I was surprised. But I felt no fear, only a profound benevolence and release. Overcome, tears filled my eyes, as I realised that I had become aware of something that I could make a whole-hearted stand for. That I could put all of myself behind, without reservation and beyond concern for self. That I could nurture and protect with every part of my being come what may.
Life.
I am imagining that it may sound odd to read this. Making a stand for life? What can that possibly mean?
Before, nothing had been sufficiently motivating to move me to feel zealous. In that moment the slow, invisible work unifying fractured glimpses of understanding somehow precipitated and the deepest of meanings became clear. I would die for life to continue. I had been able to say that for particular humans but for nothing else. No cause or object, idea, desire or project.
Afterwards, life as a whole became the prime inspiration. I was not concerned with my own life but life itself. The life that flows and has flowed and will flow through everything that has lived for the last 4 billion yearsish. Helping that one, continuous, ever changing life flourish, in all of its mesmerising, interdependent, co-arising forms is the work of all life. Life is the living and meaning of itself.
Whatever is done should be for the good of all of life, not just part of it. Navigating this way is a very different experience and wholly challenging. Today it seems as hard as ever it has been and yet we have greater power to end life than at any time in our history. But it must be done. By as many of us as possible, as often as possible. So that life can continue. Not without change and not without death. All of life consumes life.
It consumes and it generates in the same moment and it continues. Much of our activity in recent decades and today focuses not on the continuous but on the terminus. We imagine endings as if they are imperative and we fear them at the same time. We imagine that endings are possible because we imagine that there is separation where there is not. We see single lives were there is only one life that is every changing and renewing in form.
If we blindly remove ourselves from this process we cannot know if it is for good or ill. However we can encourage life as a whole with the highest sense of consideration we can muster. Including the fleeting expression of life that walks around in our own bodies. That is as precious, but no more precious, as all other life.
To truly position our own experience in relation to that of the wheeling, rolling, coursing life around us, so that the whole flourishes and we flourish with it, is not easy but it is simple. Far more simple than what we are collectively attempting at this time. This way has been natural for various cultures in various epochs. It is not radical. It is our current ways that are radical.
This is a difficult notion to express in prose. I can feel myself straining to find a way and not quite managing it. Perhaps that is for the best. It is too big and too full and too complete to fit inside ordinary language. Such language fits inside it. There are bigger containers than language. So I fled to poetry and the relative safety of trying to say what can’t be said with language that is fantastical, finite and formed.
The words I heard on the cushion were quickly followed, over the coming days, with three couplets. Which have become a loosely held mantra that I return to.
‘Give shelter. Share consciousness. Encourage life’.
In the Lifesider Poetry Collection, the original Lifesider poem was joined by a poem for each of the three couplets. It is fragments of these three poems that escaped the page and found their way, their own way, onto The Lifesider Chair.
Who knows where the chair and its words will go next. It might come into your life. If you would like to own it have a look here. Having sat on it for a good few months now, being with it before letting it go, I can vouch that it is a fine chair. A lovely piece of seateary. It will sit you well. Who knows, perhaps the words will live you well too.