Listening for the call of the Real

March 20, 2003

Dear Ken,

A gnome garden DC made resides on our coffee table. It enchants me. The plants I recognize are a tiny jade tree and two cactuses. I do not recognize the gnomes, but all three look happy in their small world made of earth and the clay pot the garden occupies.

The gnomes appear at once wise and playful. The largest, only about a foot tall, wears a coned red cap. A bunny plays at his feet, his eyes are slightly raised toward the heavens.

One companion pushes a wood cart. The other has a walking stick in one hand and flowers in his other. A frog, a butterfly and rocks live in this garden.

Scripture says we were created in a garden. Perhaps that is why gardens of any kind comfort and enchant us, cast a spell on us. On the road to the cabin on the Castor River, a family has turned their back yard into a fairyland with statues of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. They believe in enchantment.

Spells are being cast on us all the time. Music, a painting, a play, a book can transform, if even for just a few minutes, and that reverie transcends the world in which everything is defined by the question "How does this affect me?" and creates a clean new space that defines itself. No modern hieroglyphics are required. The art just is. It's a lesson in living.

Rabindranath Tagore, India's great 20th century mystic poet and independence leader, said art "is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real." This is a good time to ask ourselves what Real is. The bombs and missiles that are raining on Iraq as you read this are real enough but not Real. The Real is the mystery we all come from, the garden where all things are born, grow and eventually die in order to be reborn again.

The Real is where we are loved beyond any doubt, we understand beyond any question.

Namaste is the Sanskrit greeting that means "I bow to the divine in you." The Real is a place inside each one of us, the God in us all.

Many seek to cast spells over us: Politicians, the media, commentators with unGodly visions of remaking the world, advertisers, our jobs, spouses, lovers, the culture we are part of itself. Some are the call of the Real. Some will steal your soul if you let them.

From "Gitanjali," the songs that earned Tagore the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913:

"Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.

This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.

At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.

Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine.

Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill."

This letter itself attempts to cast a spell different from the pictures of mayhem that may be flooding our senses this morning. It is a reminder to find yourself a garden where you can listen for the eternally new call of the Real.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.