Unity, also called harmony, is an important principle of art. It goes far beyond coherence leading us to wholeness. Harmony in art overall is achieved when the elements of an artwork come together in a unified way. In music harmonisation sounds pleasant to the ear when there is a balance between the consonant and dissonant sounds. In simple words, that occurs when there is a balance between "tense" and "relaxed" moments.
What has this to do with life?
Life is about the relentless commitment to harmonising behaviours, decisions, words, and actions. It is moving in harmony which gives us the opportunity to fulfil our purpose.
Our development as individuals and the development of business, society, education, politics… Are tight together in the need for developing a new language of harmony and unity. Poetry is this language.
Poetry supports us to reconcile the tensions, paradoxes, complexities that seem to bring us out of harmony into dissonance and cacophony. It explores and expresses both fears and hopes, providing a way to clearly navigate (feel and experience) emotions during such overwhelming and burdensome periods of transformation, like the global crisis we are experiencing at the moment. From viral to vital with poetry from the heART. This is how we create culture like a piece of art... We must start with ourselves to expand that harmony to the world. The true work is figuring out ways in which the whole of our humanity can work harmoniously and re-image the future.
Opposites do not negate each other, they co-create reality. Parker Palmer said that: “when we think them apart we destroy the wholeness that they can bring to our lives”. When we think them apart we move away from harmony. Only when they come together there is the opportunity to shift to the “primacy of the whole”. We destroy the harmony and integrity of the whole when we think of taking apart the tension between the paradoxes of life instead of using them to create an harmonic sound; like when we stretch the string of a violin to have the right tension that produces an harmonious melody.
What if we start living in harmony?
The harmony between the inner and outer worlds we inhabit, the masculine and the feminine, intuition and logic thinking, light and shadow…those polarities we constantly try to pull apart. When we pull them apart to affirm the supremacy of one over the other, fragmentation, imbalances and inequalities build up. Our work is to create ways to hold those paradoxes, that bring together the two poles. The question is then how?
It takes the courage to divorce manipulation and mere engineering in name of the creation (like artists do) of a systems where the connections are maintained: connection with self, connection with others, connection with the environment. The challenge is expanding while moving towards the intersection where those connections are established.
Integrity is the ability to pull everything together at the intersection.
The first thing (not the only one) we can do is starting with self. John O’ Donhoue wrote in Walking on the Pastures of Wonder: “So many people are frightened by the wonder of their own presence. They are dying to tie themselves into a system, a role, or to an image, or to a predetermined identity that other people have actually settled on for them.”
Now, in this global crisis, we are assisting at the crumbling of the limits and illusion of a fragmented identity tied to roles, status and appearances. We are required to expand and integrate back all we have carved out to fit in. A simple (not easy) way to rediscover, or discover for the first time, the integrity of our beings (in harmony with all there is) is through inquiry. I am inviting you on this journey of inquiry to embrace the heartist within and reNEW in harmony!
Some inquiries we can use to move closer to integrity and harmony are:
- Am I the real me or the me I was taught to be?
- Am I the one others see with the eyes and the eyes only?
- How can I start including and valuing all I have carved out in order to fit in?
Once we can do it with ourselves we can expand to others. I’m inviting you to see in this crisis the opportunity to explore a larger, more complex and more nuanced presence than what cultural conditioning, other people’s opinions and inaccurate conclusions made us believe.
What can you do today to make space to this exploration? Do not think of engineering it, instead dream of yourself as an artist in the studio aiming at creating harmony, what emerges?
I am offering as an inspiration a poem I have written a couple of years ago during an exploration around the Mt. Blanc. The poem is called “I Sat There” (published by Exposition Review in 2019, read it here). As we are all asked to sit where we have not chosen, where is not comfortable, where we can no longer hide, let’s practice inquiry together and create harmony.
The complexity of modern systems and their healing cannot be understood by our old ways of separating, rearranging and doing but through harmony and unity.
"POETRY EVERY MOMENT NOT JUST DURING CRISES, NOT TO ENTERTAIN BUT, TO LEARN HOW TO BE HUMANS. NOT IN JUDGEMENT, NOT IN DUALITY BUT, IN HARMONY" my wish for you and me.
If you’re interested to learn more about our knowledge and experience and discuss how we could help through our consultancy, workshops, and talks, drop us a line at fateme@rnewb.com.
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