30/11/2020
NOSTALGIA
is the arriving wave form of what we thought was a lost physical memory, the re-emergence of a past we thought was gone, now newly remembered and about to be re-imagined by a mind and a body at last ready to come to terms with what actually occurred.
Nostalgia subverts the present by its overwhelming physical connection to a place, to a time in which we lived or to a person or people with whom we lived, making us wonder, in the meeting of past and present, if the intervening years ever occurred. Nostalgia can feel like an indulgence, a sickness, an inundation by forces beyond us, but strangely, forces that have also lived with us and within us, all along.
Nostalgia is not indulgence. Nostalgia tells us we are in the presence of imminent revelation, about to break through the present structures held together only by the way we not have remembered deeply enough: something we thought we understood but that we are now about to understand more fully, something already lived but not fully lived, something that was important, but something to which we did not grant importance enough; issuing not from our future but from something already experienced; something now wanting to be lived again, at the depth to which it first invited us but which we originally refused.
Nostalgia is not an immersion in the past, nostalgia is the first annunciation that the past as we have known it, is coming to an end.
…
‘NOSTALGIA’
From CONSOLATIONS:
The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press 2017
https://davidwhyte.com/collections/books/products/consolations-the-solace-nourishment-and-underlying-meaning-of-everyday-words-pb
…
We are all, almost afraid of nostalgia and we have been told all our lives not to trust it; which in a way, is once again, being told not to trust our own bodies and the many expressions of that body, living through the thresholds of time and tide as it does. This was my attempt to rehabilitate not only the word, but the felt experience. Nostalgia fully felt always flowers into something merciful, forgiveness for a former partner, heart felt gratitude for having had the gift of a good father, forgiveness for a difficult one. The difficulty lies in allowing ourselves to fully experience the absolute physicality of what is emerging. Nostalgia is imminent revelation arriving from deep below our horizon of understanding, from the center of the body, rather than from the heavens above. DW
..
Friends Past and Present.
Photo © David Whyte
Asilomar beach, Monterey Bay.
January 12th 2018
