Is reality itself a settled fact or an ongoing act of creation? Is some new chapter in history struggling to be born? Or, more demandingly, are we facing our own awakening within it? Poet Christian Wiman weaves together his own thoughts with the words of exiled Russian poet Osip Mandelstam in an effort to notice the entanglement of external reality with our perceiving it—”It is now. / It is not.” This intimate dialogue between subject and object suggests that individual consciousness isn’t owned as much as it is shared with everything else. And from this awareness, both feeling and healing can emerge.
This reflection originally appeared in our episode, “What Is Struggling to Be Born?” framed by an address from Fr. Tomáš Halík and recorded at the National Cathedral on the Understory’s opening night.
