Motus Mentis

It’s just spring here in Wellfleet, and suddenly there are daffodils everywhere.

I love daffodils; they seem perfect to me. They sing of warm spring sunlight, and cool clear air, and dark fertile soil, and of beauty unvanquished. I’ve always thought that daffodils are pure joy.

I’ve written in these pages, from time to time, about some of the ideas I’ve encountered in my contact with systems of “inner work”. In particular I’ve mentioned the ideas that the Greek/Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff brought to the West at the beginning of the last century: a distillation of the esoteric teachings of various Central Asian “schools”.

One of the ideas of this system is that we are ‘three-brained beings’: that within us are three very distinct centers of activity whose operation, in a perfected being, would be harmonized under the executive control of a single, awakened ‘I’ — but which, in our disordered state, just run along ‘willy-nilly’, quite separately and chaotically. These centers correspond, in simple terms, to the intellect, the emotions, and the drives and instincts of the physical body. In our usual state, sometimes one is in charge, sometimes another; sometimes they bicker and disagree. Often they just go about their business quite independently.

Why am I mentioning all of this here? Because I was reminded of something that happened to me, something that gave me some empirical data about all of this.

Many years ago, I was walking in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden with my mother-in-law Lily on a fine April day. We were arguing about something. (Lily, for all her talents and fascinating charms, is a stubborn and opinionated woman, and often a quarrelsome one, and of course readers of this blog will know that I have a scrappy streak myself.)

So: there I was, fully engaged in heated debate about some forgotten topic, and thinking about nothing else, when I became aware, quite gradually at first, of a strange feeling in my middle — a kind of warmth, not at all unpleasant. Eventually this spreading warmth became insistent enough for me to give it my full attention, and then I realized what it was.

While I was busy arguing with Lily, we happened to be standing in front of a little grassy rise, and bursting from the green grass were hundreds and hundreds of daffodils, positively singing in the warm April sunshine. (Here’s a picture of that very spot.) While my intellectual part, and my attention, were completely ensnared by Lily and the argument we were having, my emotional center, on this perfect spring day, was having a little dance-party with all those daffodils, without my even knowing it was happening.

My words trailed off as I began to understand what was going on, and after a minute Lily’s did too. We just stood there feeling happy.

I’ve never forgotten that experience. It was as if those daffodils needed to teach me something, then and there, and made sure I learned it. I thank them, every April.