Exquisite Noticing, and the Untranslatable Inside
Hello friends,
I’ve recently met a super-alive woman and we are interested in each other’s inner lives. Our getting-to-know-you process is full of rich, gentle inquiry. In respect for the questions, which are real and deep, I still myself and reach for non-trite answers, diving under my patterned responses for what is actually true now. In this way, the dialogue is turning out to be self-discovery more than PR, for both of us.
At the same time, I notice the impossibility of words. Each of us carries a personhood, persona and personality shaped by so many complex inputs, and always changing, how could we ever truly know another? In relationship we do our best to receive and attend, to mirror, to offer kindness and presence. Yet the interiority of another, their meaning making, their route, may remain unknowable.
Have a look at this with me. See how pouring a lot of energy into figuring people out is really a way of seeking safety. If I can read you, I can predict you, and if I can predict you, I can protect myself. See how having strong pattern recognition of human behavior can be both a gift and a blinding function, a form of projection. See how satisfying it is to mind to label another (with a diagnosis or a type or a sign) and be the knower! See also how much energy might be going into needing others to understand or feel us, into convincing, into doing little monkey dances to be seen and heard.
So in this current exploration, I’ve dropped the desire for a fixed, firm understanding, and I stay in the unfolding, with more wonder and emergence. I am loving sharing a lens, and looking at things together. It is so EASY. It is so joyful. I give myself over to the untranslatability and stay centered in myself.
What we can know directly, beyond words, is the frequency signature. Each of us carries a legible aura, a field, which arrives to others as images and impressions: maybe as color, a landscape, a quality of light, a sense of age or youth, a quality of being. Sometimes whole scenes comes through, as if the soul is showing me a picture. I feel this energy signature in my body too, in whether I soften or brace, in the warmth or the guardedness between us. The frequency knowing arrives whole and wordless, let it inform me. That is the terrain of walking into a room and having a sense, or meeting a stranger and having a sense, it is the terrain of silent hand holding, of floating in the ocean, or dancing, or making love, or meditating, it’s the place of pilgrimage and witnessing. The language of mere presence.
Today’s essay, for paid subscribers, honors the incredible Anne Carson who at 76 just won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, and investigates translatability, exquisite attention, and reveling in ambiguity, through a tantric lens.
Thank you to those of you who find the work worthy of cash exchange. It’s validating, and gives me more freedom to deepen in my thinking, writing and offerings from my unique essence, which is a dream come true.
All love,
Christine
