"Singularity"

and hiraeth

Ancient stones

Last week, the wonderful Alison Darnbrough brought this beautiful poem to our writing group as a prompt:

SINGULARITY
by Marie Howe

          (after Stephen Hawking)

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?….

I highly recommend reading the rest, or even better listen to the poet read it out (on the same link).

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I have fleetingly had those experiences of being one with everyone and everything, most recently just days before our writing session with this piece. I am by nature a questioner: I do not take things for granted. I long to look behind the scenes to see what is really going on. I poke holes, tease and test and am rarely satisfied by the answers I get.

All that said, there is one thing I believe with every cell of my being: we are deeply connected. I also have a strong hunch that if we were able to feel that more often the world would be a safer, happier place.

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Flowering current

This is what I wrote in response to Marie Howe’s words:

Hannah Dorman once tried to teach me how to pronounce hiraeth: a Welsh word with no direct English translation. It means homesickness tinged with grief. A word for the diaspora. To her it meant longing for a home. To me it conjures nostalgia for things I have not known. Like the singularity we once were - when I was you and you were me and we were all the dreams of each other¹.

A kind of experiential reality I did not know was possible. I thought this body, living this life, in this place, these times, was somehow separate. I swallowed the myth of separation with every breath of dirty air. I lived with a yearning that felt hopeless. An unrequited love, a grief-stricken homesickness.

I did not find just one way back to singularity, I found many threads, fine as gossamer on trails I hesitate to call paths. I found my way back to myself, to the home I keep within me. The place that houses the divine and the ridiculous, the sacred and the profane.

When Hannah tried to teach me how to pronounce hiraeth it was a word I no longer had cause to use.

1. The words of Rachel Corrie, who was brutally killed by Israeli troops in Rafah in 2003 were in my mind: “we have got to understand that they dream our dreams and we dream theirs”