Entangling two worlds
Entangling two worlds
As the old year fades into the new, I find myself wrestling with a familiar tension. It’s a feeling that has surfaced many times before, one I’ve come to recognise as the challenge of living in two worlds. One world—the ‘foreground reality’—is the noisy, insistent rhythm of everyday life: career, family, consumption, schedules. It’s the life that demands my attention at every turn. It feels stressful, fast-past, lacking space for deeper reflection.
But behind that, there is another world—a quieter one. It’s harder to describe, but it’s there, like a gentle hum beneath the surface. It reminds me there is more to life than the script I’ve inherited through my culture: more than the to-do lists, the accomplishments, the endless pursuit of “more.” Whenever I engage with this reality, it makes me calm down, feel more expansive and connected.
In the last few years, I have discovered through various practices I have engaged in how to access this background world. But I've been constantly struggling to bring the two together, to straddle these two worlds. And yet, I feel a growing wish to integrate them, to let the stillness of the background guide me even in the noisy, messy foreground. Whenever I manage to bring more of the background reality into my everyday life, life feels calmer, more meaningful, less erratic. And I feel I'm making better decisions.
I don't see the attribute 'background' as negative. On the contrary. The background is more encompassing, goes deeper, than the foreground. For me, it certainly feels more real when I deeply engage with it. More and more, the 'foreground reality' feels like a play, motions to go through because that is what you do.
I often feel like I can only access the background reality during special, intentionally curated moments—when the noise of the foreground quiets just enough to let it surface. Yet I want to learn how to carry that stillness with me, even in the clamor of the everyday.
This returned realisation has triggered a sort of New Year’s resolution in me, even though I am not a fan of such resolutions, which is to try to more deeply entangle the background into everyday life, to listen, and to "soften into the generous embrace of the present," as my embodiment teacher Philip Shepherd writes, and let myself be guided by it. I am not sure what this will look like. I don't want to set myself targets like writing a daily reflection journal or engaging more in mindfulness practice - even though both of these might be helpful indeed.
A few things I have read in the last few days have triggered this reflection, two of them are publicly available. One is a poem written by Nora Bateson called Morale (she recently shared it on LinkedIn). In it, she describes the two worlds in her own way.
A few lines describing the foreground reality:
When the tidal wave, the earthquake, the drought and the flood are all coming at once,
When the metallic ideas of a world high on technology make my lungs freeze,
When the cold distance of the logic of getting through a day of grids, schedules and protocols becomes predictably claustrophobic,
When my sleep thins with worry and looping wires of remorse,
When the children’s eyes grey with futures where they only see chaos, and as their mama I cannot help find the chroma, the blush, the glow to grow into,
When the bloodstains of several hundred years of exploitation are revealed to be not only in every aspect of my day, but also inside me
And then, the shift to the background:
Then the shine of rain on newly washed leaves is something like grace,
The curvature of my children's cheekbones is a marvel of creation,
The coarse calluses of my beloved’s hands comfort raw isolation with warm skill and strength of knowing as only hands know.
The birdsong awakens my nervous system like moonlight flickering on water,
The immense history of intergenerational tending in a single recipe for soup, is itself the medicine; a broth of ancient touch,
Then the devotion present in waking up tomorrow and feeding the dog sweetens, breaks open that gourd to spill my nectar of care recklessly,
Then all the creatures, with their fur and slime and toes and fins and fangs and whiskers and babies and illnesses… come into a vision of adoration, fascination, wonder and ubiquitous sacred performance.
You should definitely read the whole poem.
The second is a piece from Brain Pickings that has shown up in my stream this morning, titled 'Wherever You Are, Stop What You're Doing' (shared here). It reminded me that there are so many things we don't even perceive anymore because of the noise of the foreground reality and that it takes a conscious effort to stop and look for them.
Stop and look at the tangled rootlets of the poison ivy vine climbing the locust tree. Notice the way they twist around each other like plaits in a golden braid, like tendrils of seaweed washed to shore…
Stop and ponder the skeleton of the snakeroot plant, each twig covered in tiny brown stars. The white petals, once embraced by bees, have dried to powder and now dust the forest floor, but here are the star-shaped sepals that held those fluffs of botanical celebration…
Stop and listen to the ragged-edged beech leaves, pale specters of the winter forest. They are chattering ghosts, clattering amid the bare branches of the other hardwoods. Wan light pours through their evanescence and burnishes them to gleaming. Deep in the gray, sleeping forest, whole beech trees flare up into whispering creatures made of trembling gold.
The third was written by Philip Shepherd and his wife Allyson and posted in the TEPP Community Mighty Network, reminding me very much of the embodiment journey I have been on, guided by these two generous and beautiful souls.
As I step into this new year, my resolution is not a list of goals but a quiet intention: to listen for the subtle tug of the background even in the clamour of the foreground. I don't think the two worlds are separate really—they are threads of the same fabric, waiting to be woven together.