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January 22, 2024

There’s Energy To The Familiar

Jacques de Villiers writes about the spirituality of writing.

Article 13/365 of Jacques’s Writing Quest

There’s energy to the familiar. Place has memory and time has memory.

I’ll never forget when I used to sleep in the mosque (مَسْجِد) at the spiritual retreat in Walker Fruit Farms. I had a profound and tranquil sleep every time. Countless prostration and prayers echoed off the walls and rose up from the Persian carpets. It was like a homecoming to the source. Comforting like a mother to a child. 

I’ve always loved hanging out in holy spaces. They carry the essence of the divine and the magnitude of everything that is. I’ve spent a lot of time in cathedrals in France and Italy, prayed in Dutch Reformed churches, given thanks at shamanic Despachos, meditated to music at kirtan, and remembered my Rab at Dhikr.

I’ve created a small space for myself at my home where I undertake my spiritual practice; prayer and meditation. The more I practice in this space, the more I feel its energy growing. Sometimes I just step into the space, and immediately feel a profundity of being. 

I’ve discovered that doing my spiritual practice at the same time every day, in the special space I’ve created, has a much bigger impact.

I would imagine that the place and time has become what the NLP practitioners call a trigger. I grooved a habit. 

I’ve managed to do the same for my writing. I write at the same place every day and have set up quirky rituals that help me get into the groove. I’m assuming that speaking to Hemingway is quirky and not on the road to full-blown madness. I always give thanks to the muse, Calliope who helps me become eloquent and heroic in my writing.

The more I practice (spirituality and writing), the more the two intertwine and blur into a consciousness stream. I can’t tell the difference between them any more. I cannot separate them from me and me from them. We are no thing and one thing. The more I practice these things, the more I see a sliver of the divine. Let’s hope I don’t run out of road before I turn that sliver into a crack so that I can get a peek at enlightenment. How wonderful would that be?

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