Journal of an Awakening

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44: Nursing. The natural focal distance for an adult's eyes is twenty feet and on; the natural focal distance for an infant's eyes is eighteen inches, the distance between a woman's nipple and her nose. (Infants look at, and remember, noses rather than eyes.) Feeding, important as it may be, is only the beginning of what is going on when a mother is nursing a child. To put it another way, the necessity of physical feeding provides the occasion for a kything of love that provides even more necessary spiritual feeding.

45: Pregnancy. A fortiori.

46: Timeless moments. One person, speaking of singing a worship song, suggested thinking not so much in terms of "We start and stop this song," as "This song always has been going on and always will be going on; we just step into it for a time." In this spirit, there are moments of kything, often unsought and unattempted, which do not so much start and stop as are a stepping into the Eternal Kythe.

47: Parenting a child with a severe disease. At a bioethics conference, Dr. C. Everett Koop said, "There is a special bond that forms with a defective child, often far moreso than a normal child." He told a story from the practice of a Jewish pediatrician and colleague. A father lost a second child to Tay-Sachs, a degenerative disease whose people do not live to the age of four. Grieving, he said through tears, "He never gave me a moment's trouble." I am not sure why this is, but it may have something to do with why I enjoy a small glass of wine more than a bottomless cup of Coke.

48: Corporate worship. Worship is a foretaste of Heaven, and it plays a focal role in the Eastern Orthodox emphasis on bringing Heaven down to earth; they describe their worship as stepping into Heaven. Worship is also the highest form of love. In these two aspects, at least, worship is kything. Corporate worship is a kything not only with God, but with the others you are worshipping with.

49: Janra-ball. This is a game I devised, and has been described as a Zen NOMIC. To excerpt the ingredients list:

Springfield, Monty Python, Calvin-Ball, body language, Harlem Globetrotters, sideways logic, Thieves' Cant, Intuition, counter-intuitive segues, spoon photography, creativity, Zen koans, Psychiatrist, adrenaline, perception, tickling, urban legend Spam recipe, swallowing a pill, illusionism, NOMIC, modern physics, raw chaos, F.D. & C. yellow number 5.

I originally hesitated to put this in, on the grounds that it is difficult to play, at least in a pure state. There've been a couple of times I've gotten together a group of people willing to play, and it didn't work. I thought it would require players with more of something -- perception, intuition, creativity, spontaneity, etc. -- but in thinking recently, I have come to believe that it's something, like empathic listening, that can't just be turned on at will, especially by someone inexperienced (which would be everyone now). Joseph's behavior at the game last night persuaded me that it is indeed possible, perhaps best started at in small increments from a more structured game. (Maybe Pooh's Corner will be able to play. Who knows?) I will say this: It's a difficult game to play, but if you can play it, it's an awesome kythe.

For further information, click here.

50: Synchronicity/attunement. As treated in The Dance of Life, people have rhythms about them -- outside of conscious awareness -- and when people are together, these rhythms can become attuned (and, if so, the people themselves are more attuned). This is something that is not as well appreciated in our culture as in others. The easiest example or analogue I can point to (I'm not sure which) is in walking together and holding hands. When I was dating Rebecca, it took me a long time to learn to get in step, and stay in step -- but things were smoother when I did.

51: A kind of openness. There is a kind of openness where you perceive something but can't put your finger on exactly what. If you can listen, be opening, look, then there is a sort of listening kything. I checked out a copy of A Wind in the Door yesterday, and when I was reading through to find insights for more ways of kything, I came on something that I felt was significant to what I'm writing, but I couldn't say what. I sat then, open, thinking, waiting to see what it was -- and then realized that it was not the heart of a way of kything, but something to put at the beginning:

What he had actually seen she could not begin to guess. That he had seen something, something unusual, she was positive.

This is the same sort of feeling I felt about kything.

This is part of how kything is to Charles Wallace:

Meg said sharply, "Why? What did mother say?"

Charles Wallace walked slowly through the high grass in the orchard. "She hasn't said. But it's sort of like radar blipping at me."

This kind of listening kythe is how I get a lot of the ideas for these items.

52: Introspection.

Then [Blajeny] sat up and folded his arms across his chest, and his strange luminous eyes turned inwards, so that he was looking not at the stars nor at the children but into some deep, dark place far within himself, and then further. He sat there, moving in, deeper and deeper, for time out of time. Then the focus of his eyes returned to the children, and he gave his radiant smile and answered Calvin's question as though not a moment had passed.

Introspection is a kything with oneself.

54: Artistic appreciation. In high school, I made a silver ring, designed to hold a drop of water as a stone. When I started to paint, I learned a new way of seeing. After a painting in which a pair of hands played prominently, I was captivated by the beauty of people's hands all around me; for the first time in my life, I saw in them a beauty as great as that of faces.

What an artist does is allow you to see through his eyes. When you look at a friend's watercolor, you are seeing the beach through her eyes, as you would not have perceived it yourself. When you read this list, you are thinking about the word 'kythe' through my mind.

55: Talking. This one is so obvious I overlooked it completely. The magic of symbols that allows mind-to-mind communication is one that is appreciated, for instance, when trying to work with someone who doesn't speak a common language with you.

56: Looking into another person, and telling him what you see. I have always enjoyed other people telling me what they see in me. For a time, I thought that was vanity, and vanity certainly played a part. But recently, I have come to see a deeper reason for asking this of other persons.

I have for a while enjoyed asking foreigners what they think of American culture, and probed a bit not only for the appreciation they will voice, but criticisms. Most foreigners can articulate the character of American culture better than can most Americans, and they have insights that wouldn't occur to an American. They see things that have become invisible to Americans. They have a distance, like aesthetic distance, that allows them to see what is too close to be visible to us.

For the same or analogous reasons, having another person tell you what he sees in you is another variant on introspection, like using a mirror in looking at yourself to see parts you can't look at directly. Different people who have known you for different amounts of time can see different parts of you.

When you tell another person what you see in him, you provide this sort of introspection; your words fuse with his knowledge of himself to form a deeper self-knowledge, and say more to him than they would mean to anyone else. They connect. They kythe. It is like the story of the crystal globe -- only you can tell people how beautiful they are.

57: Driving. In the car this morning, after having to take my brother to school and my mother to work, I was thinking about the podracing in Star Wars: Episode I -- one of the most Jedi/Force parts of the movie -- and I realized I was really enjoying driving for the first time in years. (I started late in driving, and have a fear of it. I had enjoyed singing while driving, but not driving itself.) I was very aware of my surroundings, and connected, and entered flow. Though I stayed within the speed limit and there were no hazardous conditions, it was in a very real sense podracing. It was a kythe with my surroundings and especially with my car, which was as an extension of my body. It is entirely possible to kythe with technology (and I was seeking an example), to have your hands on a steering wheel or a keyboard so that you are thinking through them, and your thoughts are not on your hands or fingertips, but where the car is moving, or what letters are appearing on the screen. Technology (techne, art + logos, logic, reason, domain of knowledge) is part of the creation of the imago Dei, and therefore has a role in God's order. There is a tendency for the sort of people interested in kything things to be Luddites, but this need not be. If you can kythe with God, with another person, with a shaggy dog, with the grass, with ideas, with experiences, then you can also kythe with a car, with a computer.

58: Pain. This one will probably be difficult for most Americans to understand, and I'm not sure I can explain it well -- here I will probably be talking around my point mostly. We live in a painkilling culture, one that attemps to delete that entire region of human experience, and therefore neither understands nor profits from it.

A place to begin is to say that leprosy ravages the body through one very simple means: it shuts off a person's ability to feel pain. Exactly how shutting off pain causes such severe damage is left as a valuable exercise to the reader's imagination. Pain is an awareness of your body's state, and of what you can and cannot do without aggravating an injury. I very rarely take painkillers, because I want to know exactly how my body is doing. (Sunday night was the first time in memory of taking a painkiller not prescribed by a doctor.)

In addition, pain is a present sensation; it is not in our nature to not notice. Intense pain can fill consciousness. (Some mentally ill people self-mutilate because the sensation of physical pain, if only momentarily, can take them out of their mental anguish.) If all our kything is as real as pain, we are doing well.

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