The power of ‘something’…
Written by Lian Brook-Tyler
I’m reading a book ‘The way of the human being’ about commonalities in Native Americans’ way of seeing the world.
It talks about how they share a perspective of seeing things as ‘plenipotential’ – defined as ‘full of potential for being a number of things at once’.
They are often careful to refer to things as ‘something’ instead of naming it as a specific thing which could solidify it into a permanent fixed state.
This is likened to some of the findings of quantum physics in which a thing isn’t a specific thing until it’s observed and defined (that’s very much my lay person’s summary, don’t take that bit too literally!)
This way of seeing the world feels strangely familiar to me – I think I’ve spent much of my life in a bit of a mist of vagueness around certain things!
Anyway, earlier I applied this perspective to a stuck lid on a jar of sauerkraut.
It was stuck tighter than a tight thing.
I had tried to open it, my mother-in-law had tried and finally, my husband had tried… it didn’t budge.
I tried it again today, it was still stuck tight, I was just thinking that we’d simply have to give up on it… and then it occurred to me that maybe it was only stuck in a world where it was being observed and measured as stuck.
In a plenipotential world it could be anything from stuck to not stuck (and possibly some other things too!)
I saw it as simply ‘something’.
And just like magic… it opened!
Maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe this is just a silly story. But for Native Americans some stories have power.
Maybe this story has some power, despite the rather mundane inclusion of sauerkraut.
Where in your life could you soften your gaze and see the power of ‘something’?
Coming up in 2021 there will be more ways that you can walk the path of Waking The Wild. It’s going to be an epic year of Soul, Myth & Magic if we have anything to do with it! To find out more go to: Go deeper – Primal Happiness –