Resonance is a lovely word. Even when saying the word silently in the mind, there is a reverberation with each syllable. And so, it is with haikus, the unrhymed poetic form that first emerged in Japan. Feel the resonance of 18thcentury haiku master Issa’s poetry:
On a branch
floating downriver
a cricket, singing.
Studying to become a therapist some decades ago, my education marinated me in the wisdom and skill of Carl Rogers, founder of humanistic psychology and person-centred therapy. Rogers believed that people (and all living beings) are inherently motivated toward self-actualization, the process of claiming or reclaiming our true, or authentic beings and coming into congruence with ourselves and our lives. A state of incongruence, he said, is marked by ‘the false fronts, or the masks, or the roles, with which the person has faced life’ while congruence is synonymous with being ‘integrated, whole, and genuine’. But being congruent is not just a wholesome state within, it is also living congruently with all of life. Susan Murphy, Australian Zen teacher and author writes: ‘That human beings can- indeed, must- consciously seek congruence with the ecological wholeness of natural systems is held as a sacred fact by traditional peoples…’ and ‘It is this self that is no longer separate and standing alone, but gathered in and companioned, naturally seeking greater congruence with what is unfolding.’ (A Fire Runs Through All Things, 2023).
In the mid-nineties, I flung myself into a wild adventure. One early May morning I set out on a six-month journey through this vast Australian continent, seeking out the smallest tracks, the remotest places, and the most untouched wilderness areas. With me, in my small but hardy four-wheel drive, I carried the bare essentials to camp out, traverse deserts and explore vast coastlines, and I had my beloved dog Molly as a fellow adventuress on my side. After some weeks of only experiencing the vast space and silence of the desert, of observing a plant and animal life so highly attuned to the sparseness of resources, of being cradled by the infinity of the universe in the night, I began to change. My being began to come into resonance with a world almost untouched by civilisation. My eyesight, hearing and smell became keener, my body planted itself more solidly onto the Earth, my instincts sharpened, and I sensed things I hadn’t known were there. The rhythm of life began to include me, and I lost a sense of separateness and distance.
I felt, I think, the congruence Murphy speaks of. And that Vietnamese Zen monk and activist, Thich Nhat Hanh, meant by the word ‘interbeing’, a term he coined to express the profound interconnectedness of all things. He says:
‘Interbeing is the understanding that nothing exists separately from anything else. We are all interconnected. By taking care of another person, you take care of yourself. By taking care of yourself, you take care of the other person. Happiness and safety are not individual matters. If you suffer, I suffer. If you are not safe, I am not safe. There is no way for me to be truly happy if you are suffering. If you can smile, I can smile too. The understanding of interbeing is very important. It helps us to remove the illusion of loneliness, and transform the anger that comes from the feeling of separation.’ (How To Fight, 2004)
While this quote sounds quite human-centric, I think it’s meant to include all living beings. As a monk steeped in the teachings of the Buddha, Thich Nhat Han spent his life in deep knowing that everything that comes into being such as an elm, a dalmatian, a turnip, a person- will also cease to be at some point, everything is in flux always, created, shaped and dismantled by the myriads of co~emerging conditions. All these energies intermingle….just take a moment to feel this next inbreath and wonder where the air that you have just drawn into your body has already been.
When parts of our being fall out of congruence with the whole – whether inside, between or with the wider world- stress ensues. Holding the tensions that arise out of incongruence is hard work yet often happens out of awareness. In therapy, in meditation, in conversation, in contemplation, in writing, in dreaming, in playing…we can discover the places of dissonance and resonance; our life is our mirror. We can see, if we let ourselves and we can adjust our path where needed.
Sometimes, places of dissonance cannot be healed, at least not in the short term. What I mean is that there are ways this world operates, in small ways and large, that are too far for the values of the heart to reach. Perhaps though, when we recognise this, it is a call to draw that which is destructive and causing suffering into our orbit of clarity and care.
Here in Augsburg, Germany, where I currently am, the annual three-months-long peace festival is underway (this year for the 375th time). The motto for 2025 is ‘Risking Peace’, a title that itself is food for thought, I think.
One of the art installations created for this year’s peace festival illustrates my earlier reflections. Its story is this: During the World Wars one and two, many of the great and small church bells around Europe were melted down on a large scale to make weaponry of war. For this art project, weapons waste from battlefields in the Ukraine was collected and with eight kilograms of Ukrainian shell casings, a new 45 kg sounding bell was cast and installed, at eye height, in the centre of the magnificent St Moritz church in Augsburg. Destruction is transformed back into beauty. From time to time, sound artists transform the spaces of stillness and silence familiar in a church, to sonar landscapes that let the listener’s heart and mind begin to resonate with the bell’s story, a story of suffering and transformation and healing. A story that in some way means something to all of us.
I leave the last words to Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh: ‘Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible’ (Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers, 2000).
May you and life resonate in harmony, and for the places of dissonance, may you have the courage and steadfastness to meet these with kindness and purposeful action.
Warmly
Sabina