🌕 In My Experience… The Map Is Not the Territory
it's a full moon in leo 🌕
Listen to me read this essay:
Hi friends
How are you — especially my cold-weather-challenged people? Is winter always so drawn-out? And dreary? I’m almost certain it’s longer and drabber now… No?
It’s finally February. I say that in exasperated italics because while I am incredibly excited about all the possibilities of 2023 and something did definitely shift for me with January ending, this year has had an astonishingly slow start and some lingering body kinks are reminding me to pace myself while nature is still freezing. My sister’s house leader, Nadège, explained to me that, in the Steiner world, Febraury 2nd (aka Ground Hog Day, aka Imbolic, aka Candlemas) is celebrated as the moment in Earth’s annual breathing cycle when the exhale initiates but does not yet fully manifest (not until the spring equinox... 😮💨).
I can’t type the word exhale and not think of this meme and I am suddenly tearily grateful for the inferno that was my life this past year and a half and how it allowed me to torch all outdated versions of me (naturally, I had to rewatch the film last night).
Image Description: GIF of Angela Basset from “Waiting to Exhale” flicking a cigarette and walking away from a burning white Mercedes.
It’s exactly 18 months to the week since I was re-diagnosed with extensive cancer throughout my (collapsed) lung, bones, and lymph nodes. The surreal time since has been an almost comic unraveling of my life.* I’m definitely feeling like Angela Basset, Whitney Houston, and Terry McMillan combined. Also, a MF phoenix.
Thank you for being here with me throughout it all.
Below is this month’s In My Experience… about how I make meaning of all this fire and such.
With love,
Sebene
p.s. I will be so ready for the balancing out-breath that is spring. In Cosmic Collage! EQUINOX, we will use meditation, reflection, imagining and collaging to explore the never-ending (i.e. cyclical) practice of balancing (in life & art). SAVE THE DATE! March 19, 1-3:30 pm ET. On Zoom. Registration opens 2/20.
* I loved having this Ten Percent Happier Podcast convo with my friends Dan Harris and Jeff Warren. The first of many, cause it’s going to be a regular thing! 🥳🤸🏾♀️🥰 In this premier episode of Meditation Party you can hear a quite lengthy description of my 18 month saga. Our retreat at Omega in October will be a collective party.
What do you imagine the meaning of your suffering is? I mean your health troubles; is there a meaning or am I foolish looking for one? With warm wishes for your thriving.
Dear The Map Is Not the Territory
Thank you for your kind wishes and for this deceptively simple question. To me, your inquiry highlights the vital practice of storytelling (you know, no biggie, just a foundation of human development), and, as you said, imagining meaning from experience. For many millennia, people have charted the journey that is existence with words and ideas, with expression and explication.
That’s what the Muriel Rukeyser quote in the email teaser is getting at: “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” Stories shape reality, myths become maps. That’s basically what traditions are.
Image Description: Meme screenshot of an Instagram reel with a Black femme presenting person under large text reading “My son just told me that ”tradition" is just peer pressure from dead people"
And I don’t mean that pejoratively because that’s also what my writing & teaching is – drawing from tradition and dead people (also living people), making maps from metaphors, and making meaning from maps.
I don’t think you’re “foolish” at all to look for meaning in experience. Finding meaning, making maps – I have found these incredibly helpful. Also fun. I do love me some lovely language & stimulating theory to help guide my life! [I remember being a teenager and wondering if there was an adult job where you get to sit around and talk about ideas with friends and now I think I did sort of manifest a life of map making 😮!!]
AND, I have to constantly remind myself about the limits of maps. How I talk about something is not the thing itself. Also, how I talk about something can never match your experience of it.
Because all of this could become a dissertation-length email, imma really try to keep this succinct (wish me luck!). Also, beware, the following act of writing is itself my personal map making…
In My Experience… I use different traditions, systems, tools, and ultimately, language itself to navigate my challenges; yet, at times, I get caught up in the cartography by thinking that, if I could simply discover or invent it, I could uncover a right route (or a destination at all) — ultimately, simply enjoying existence gets me exactly where I need to be, which is always right here.
I find maps to be informative. And beautiful. I have a gigantic world map in my kitchen. It’s over six feet tall and nine feet wide and allows me to see small countries and the tiniest of islands. It’s enhanced my understanding of our globe and I get lost in time staring at it. Obviously, it is not a substitute for the places it names.
For decades, I studied Buddhist maps of the mind which I found to be incredible guides for steering attention and cultivating awareness. As well, I have come to understand myself through various typologies including the Enneagram, Numerology, and Astrology. Exploring patterns that stem from my ancestral and karmic conditioning is also a kind of map making. For years, personal maps in the form of narratives I create through therapy, creative expression, and simply sharing/shaping my story with friends and guides have too been central to my meaning making… All of this has been useful to me.
I’ve also gone overboard in almost every single tradition & technique I just named – thinking that I would find an ultimate map or meaning to my life. I was very into lists. Lots of lists…
The map is not the territory.
Back when I used to create coaching plans, quite a few times I included for clients who were map-reliant (takes one to know one) a one-paragraph very short story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges called "On Exactitude in Science" or "On Rigor in Science" ("Del rigor en la ciencia"). It tells the story of a fictional kingdom where the science of cartography – making maps – was so perfect that only maps that were the exact size of the area they depicted were thought good enough. Here it is in full, as translated by Andrew Hurley.
In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. — Suárez Miranda, Travels of Prudent Men, Book Four, Ch. XLV, Lérida, 1658
They say we teach what we need to learn. 🙃
Of course, any attempts I have made to utilize such totalizing, point for point maps have been as disastrous as described here. Useless, really. Partly because they’re based on other people’s maps and mostly because they cover over my actual living of life. I can be so busy trying to match my experience to an idea of what I should be experiencing (a plotting or progression or perfection) that I am no longer experiencing what is in fact happening but what I believe should be happening or an interpretation of it.
Ultimately, I must engage with my own emergent, ever-changing, process–map which is made of moment by moment, breath by breath living. It's not that those other maps aren't helpful, but they're not really the point.
I was just speaking to my wise friend Vicky about this and she likened it to collaging or any artistic process. She said, “the patterns reveal themselves as you’re creating it.” And often, words and meaning fail. There's simply beauty or color or texture. There's movement and rhythm and sensation… There's a life.
So, you asked me what I imagine is the meaning of my suffering, wondering if I even do make meaning of it. I do. And it's hard to name it here because it is continually shifting. So, I guess it's meanings, plural. I believe I will never be able to name one, exact meaning. I believe that my ongoing map making is changing previous meanings, even as it shapes new ones.
I’ll end with the closing words from Joy Harjo’s poem “A Map to the Next World” and hope that we may, each of us, continue to make our own maps.
We were never perfect.
Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was
once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.
We might make them again, she said.
Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.
You must make your own map.
I could listen to Joy Harjo reading anything but especially her poem "A Map to the Next World" and before this turns into a Joy Harjo newsletter I will add only one more of her poetic map/remedies for our “postcolonial jitters.”
Here is the poem “The Speed of Darkness” where the Muriel Rukeyser quote comes from.
My friend Betsy and I saw the exhibit She Who Wrote at the Morgan Library highlighting the earliest known author: a woman named Enheduanna (ca. 2300 BC). She was a high priestess, a poet, and wielded considerable power in ancient Mesopotamia. It's on for another couple of weeks and definitely worth the visit.
Many years ago, I tried to read Metaphors We Live By, and I somehow managed to get about a third of the way through. The gist: All language is metaphor.
The World Is Made of Stories by David Loy.
For years, I had this nerdy quote from the late art critic and philosopher Arthur C Danto as my email signature and I still love it so much: We have nothing better than metaphors to use for referring to what we do not need metaphors to recognize as unique.
Nerd Alert! I think it's fair to say that science is the map of modernity and math is the map of modern science. Here's a fascinating conversation between mathematician Rafael Nuñez and physicist Max Tegmark about whether math is invented or discovered. As the moderator, cosmologist Janna Levin, says at the end, the answer is “Yes!”
SUPER Nerd Alert! I will not bother trying to intro this one but simply say, it's all subjective maps all the way down: The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality.
