Moments

I'm sharing a few anecdotes from over my life that were special in some way. I'm wary of using words like 'wondrous' or 'numinous' but they spring to mind nonetheless. May as well just dive into the most recent and then work backwards.

Carmina And Friends

For me choral performance is something of a chore. The incentive of friendships was always necessary to keep me involved and so I drifted as others did likewise. But in all that musical work there were instances that made performance worthwhile in itself. The phenemenon is well documented. A musical phrase or change seems to resonate the whole self along with those of ones peers. For an exhilerating moment one feels like part of some gestalt entity. I have experienced this a few times but never recorded those moments in writing, even if I'm sure we shared smiles and comments afterwards. I reckon it happened in Carmina Burana but that is just to put a name to this experience.

Satisfying Sketching

A decade or more ago I did a bunch of life drawing with friends volunteering as models. It was at a time in which my life was changing somewhat and collaborations like that helped me settling into a new life phase. That context may be all one needs to understand what happened next. I was drawing a friend while chatting, and as my pencil carefully drew a contour, I suddenly noticed I was enitrely content. It was hardly just that experience but rather its location in the wider context of a life that was coming together at that time (or possibly of a person who was getting better at existing in whatever life presented to him). It was more to do with the relaxed atmosphere than the use of skill.

Sunshine In Winter

Some of these anecdotes are defined by sharing something with others. This one however is a solitary moment. I was interstate for a choral festival but was yet to meet anyone. I had just navigated public transport to a campus and had time to kill while others rehearsed in a hall close by. I found a spot to sit overlooking an ornamental lake. I had just left a wintry Melbourne and was enjoying the sunshine of a more northerly latitude as it glinted off the water. Lush grounds and sandstone walls were my setting as I felt a keen sense that it would be a good weekend. And indeed it was. I cannot say it was prescience but it was more of a felling than just the shrewd assessment of conditions.

Stars In The Waves

I was at a FOME camp at the turn of the century. We stayed in a holiday house in a small coastal town. On the first night we walked over the dunes to the ocean beach and waded into the surf waves. I deliberately aimed to only go into the knees but the waves amended this to my waist. Others went in further and I monitored them. I was likely one of the better swimmers there but also one of the more cautious. The attraction of that particular night was that the waves were lit from within by phosphorescent plankton, seemingly emulating the star-filled sky. Some of the glowing dots even got stuck to our bathers in the surpringly lukewarm waters. I recently chatted about this with others online and they too remembered this as a magical moment.

Everything Will Be Alright

Way back in the 90s I was walking among remnant bushland along the Yarraman Creek. I sometimes did this as a way of taking a rest from essay-writing. On this occassion I was also suffering the remorse of an ended romance. I was in a pitiful state. As I turned from one track into another and passed the local billabong I suddenly experienced something that was bereft of sense data or words and yet affected me as if I had just recieved a message. And that message? I translated it as "everything will be alright". I later told a friend who declared that "the universe gave you a hug". I have since called this my 'pantheist moment' (or possibly the word is 'panentheist' but at the level of my experience it hardly matters). I wonder sometimes how long that assurance was supposed to last. Life had naturally been up and down many times since then. But even thinking of it can centre me now.

* * * * *

The moments I have described were just a rarity or intensity of internal personal experience. All of them can be understood as the products of a complex thinking organ we are yet to fully understand. But to varying degrees they felt to me like something more than that and something more than just me. A momentary unity with something bigger? An awareness of something that I am always part of but rarely consider? And yet also these were moments that served to help me be someone who does things his own way. It is these instances that prevent me from succumbing to the insistent overtures of militant atheists to be just like them. Rationality combines with these few fleeting experiences to hold me balanced in a state of curious agnosticism.