Something Else
"Something else" cannot be explained. If you try to pin its wings down, the energy will evaporate, but "something else" can be sensed in your presence.
Hello!
If you are in the thick of obscurity, holding inner tensions that cannot be resolved, or feeling disconnected from your deepest knowing. If you are disoriented as the sands of time flow through the hourglass at a dizzying pace and there is no rest in sight, please open to this possibility with me: a taste of something else may also be very nearby.
Precisely what?
Precisely how?
No one can say for sure,1 but breadcrumbs abound….
Something else may beckon through a felt sense of recognition, a resonance that “makes no sense” or hasn’t before been consciously considered.
💡 An idea
🖼️ An image
🎶 A song
🎬 A movie
📰 A blog post
😴 A dream
Anything, really!Something else may encircle what has been deemed unworthy, illuminating a possibility just now, just here…in the presence of something else.
Something else may not conform to time as you have previously known it. One literal instant with something else may seem like hours or even days on the inside.
Something else cannot be explained. If you try to pin its wings down, the energy will evaporate, but something else can be sensed in your presence. Knowing this will save time and energy.
Something else may be difficult to contain. This is normal. Nervous systems can be strengthened to bear what has not before been bearable…inner experiences that register as “so good” and the ones that seem “so hard.”2
Something else cannot be possessed3. Savor every last drop. That feeling you are left with is GOLD. You can work with it consciously…
✨Write a poem, paint, or collage4…whatever your current art form is, or try a brand-new-to-you medium.
✨Record a voice memo to remind yourself what you know in the presence of something else. Or send a voice memo to a friend. What do you hear in your voice?
✨Call to mind someone who is carrying a particularly fresh heartache or traversing a dense forest of uncertainty. Hold them and the feeling of something else together.
✨Take that GOLD with you on errands! How do others appear when you are fresh from something else? Your presence may transmit the glow of something else without saying a word…or maybe saying a word is exactly what you’ll intuit. There are no rules.
✨What else would you add to this list? Share an idea in the comments.
It Was Real
If you tasted something else, and now there is only absence, I am sorry.5 Please, please, please do not doubt yourself OR something else. I will make this wager: your encounter with something else was not an illusion.
Part of something else’s elusive, allusive beauty is its improvisational genius. A great shape-shifter, something else keeps things fresh. Absence may be as powerful as Presence. Both call forth great art.
With all of this context in mind, there are ways to open intentionally.6
Dear Something Else…
🫧 Sink into a present moment experience with a memory of something else. What does it feel like/taste like/smell like/look like when it arrives? Get really granular!! How do you recognize something else?
🫧 Start the day with a WISH to remember. One conscious moment of asking. Open your notes app/Notion/journal/etc. Tell something else you are opening, and you wish to see/hear/taste/smell/feel/sense/know, and then move on with your day.
You are orienting to a way of being. Expectancy without expectations.
🫧 Give yourself to rhythms and practices. There is no singular right way. Start by giving your full attention to one song. Breathe with it. Feel it. Sense it. Let it surprise you.
🫧 Honest words like these are beautiful, too…
Please, dear something else. I am lost. I am afraid. It feels like I am going under. Will you remind me of the things I know, but can’t remember?
With you and for you,
Kirsten
A Nourishing Resource
John O’Donohue is a soul friend over space and time. His words are portals to the immediacy of presence. John died unexpectedly in 2008, but the wisdom he transmitted is alive. I experience it most profoundly in his audiobooks and lectures.
The Inner Landscape is a two-chapter audio lecture John delivered on suffering, produced by Sounds True. I return to it again and again, especially when heartache and pain are most acute. Here is a description from the website:
Our bodies are mere outlines of a vast and complex interior world, a landscape of contradiction and immense mystery. This Celtic view of the human condition predates Christianity yet survives to this day as part of Ireland’s unique spiritual tradition. In The Inner Landscape, poet and Catholic scholar John O’Donohue explores the themes of self-exile and hardship and the Celtic way of welcoming paradox and finding precious light in the darkest valleys of our inner terrain.
Instead of fearing the contradictions of the outer world, O’Donohue begins, the Celtic people welcomed them. They developed special blessings for times of suffering in the belief that hardship leads to a special insight or gift of the spirit. When you learn the Celtic “secret of equilibrium” - how to see every difficulty as a threshold of possibility - you renew your life with unending possibilities. Despite our vast technologies, O’Donohue says, our real knowledge is minimal. Only within “the inner landscape” with which we are each blessed can true knowing take place.
It is also available on Audible. This is how I listen.
A Read Aloud
I recorded most of the last chapter of Living Time: And the Integration of the Life by Maurice Nicoll in the fresh presence of something else. This is not about information, but an invitation to notice inner stirrings. Is there a word or phrase that sticks with you?
Nitro is snoring quietly in the background nearby.
“If I Ever Leave This World Alive” by Flogging Molly
WATCH OR LISTEN
Song 1 of 2 on this early pandemic video…
The P.S. I Love You Movie Soundtrack Version…
If they speak in certainties, keep noticing your inner experience of their certainty. Maybe the general direction they are pointing you in is “a-okay.” If it’s super specific, it may be more about them than it is about you.
“The image ‘to bear’ is a dualistic one: We bear something that is outside us, on us, or something that is within us but other than ourselves. The terminus, however, must be unitive. And the bearing itself must be a progressive initiation into this unity, this participation in the One. We are confronted with the choice between an acceptance or a refusal of this bearing.” Bruno Barnhart, Second Simplicity
“This is like a bookmark in your heart, and little by little by little you can learn to stabilize in it.” Dr. James Finley
Listening for Wisdom Artfully on the Soulspace Blog
How to Move Through A Dark Night of the Soul: A Spiritual Director Holds Space for Obscurity on the Soulspace Blog
“We cannot make our moments of awakening happen, but we can learn to assume the stance that offers the least resistance to being overtaken.” Dr. James Finley