Thaumaturgy

I need awe and wonder in my life. I realized when I was on my trip to Baja in May that the big spaces feed my soul, definitely. Ocean, desert, forest, stars. 

The west facing side of Isla Magdalena

Endemic pines on the peaks of Isla Cedros

But there's also the wonderworking of human connection. Something vast also exists in the soul connection with another person. I'm learning how to recognize and value it for what it is. In one framework, we navigate four distinctly identifiable realms: spiritual, emotional, physical and intellectual. It's too pat, of course, but it just might be useful. 

My habitual reaction to a more vast and sublime spiritual connection with a woman in particular is to try to bring it down to the ground somehow-- usually physically. In this way, gaining control and moving from the sublime to the beautiful (in Kantian terms).

A good summary from Wiki:

Kant, in 1764, made an attempt to record his thoughts on the observing subject's mental state in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. He held that the sublime was of three kinds: the noble, the splendid, and the terrifying.

In his Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant officially says that there are two forms of the sublime, the mathematical and the dynamical, although some commentators hold that there is a third form, the moral sublime, a layover from the earlier "noble" sublime. Kant claims, "We call that sublime which is absolutely great"(§ 25). He distinguishes between the "remarkable differences" of the Beautiful and the Sublime, noting that beauty "is connected with the form of the object", having "boundaries", while the sublime "is to be found in a formless object", represented by a "boundlessness" (§ 23). Kant evidently divides the sublime into the mathematical and the dynamical, where in the mathematical "aesthetical comprehension" is not a consciousness of a mere greater unit, but the notion of absolute greatness not inhibited with ideas of limitations (§ 27). The dynamically sublime is "nature considered in an aesthetic judgment as might that has no dominion over us", and an object can create a fearfulness "without being afraid of it" (§ 28). He considers both the beautiful and the sublime as "indefinite" concepts, but where beauty relates to the "Understanding", sublime is a concept belonging to "Reason", and "shows a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of Sense" (§ 25). For Kant, one's inability to grasp the magnitude of a sublime event such as an earthquake demonstrates inadequacy of one's sensibility and imagination. Simultaneously, one's ability to subsequently identify such an event as singular and whole indicates the superiority of one's cognitive, supersensible powers. Ultimately, it is this "supersensible substrate," underlying both nature and thought, on which true sublimity is located.

So the inspiration for my own thaumaturgical impulses is, in this perspective, fueled

by an experience of the sublime. It's the sublime in music that I often look for-- for example, the seeming 

boundlessness of One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye .

Or the suggestion of the sublime in visual art, one reason abstract expressionism always appealed to me, I guess. 

Yet, somehow, when a woman really blows my mind and we meet in a sublime space where boundaries and categories get obliterated, my impulse is to define, contain, possess the experience, etc. I have been unable to allow mysteries to be mysteries, in some ways. For example, one can't really partner with the sublime, so the impulse to form a partnership with implicit or explicit agreements is another strategy to find a container for a vast experience that is otherwise unwieldy. 

My first AA sponsor used to try to explain to me the difference between relating and being in a relationship. Relating is happening in the present at all times. Being in a relationship is seeking a form for that experience. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, except that it often takes the place of relating, since we're prone to wanting everything to be human-sized, "manageable" and reliable. He used to say that a relationship is when you put your relating on a ship and wave goodbye. Ha. 

Another way to look at it is that we just can't hang for too long with the sublime. We want to make it beautiful. There's no problem in this at all, except that I tend to forget that it is a creative act I am doing that makes it seem possible. I am creating the beautiful out of the sublime. It is vital for me to recall that the materials for this creative process come from and return to the sublime-- something far greater than myself.