Echo
is always a beautiful surprise
ECHO
is beautiful and disturbing aftermath and as a word that chimes with its meaning, even carries its own lingering echoing response within its two short syllables. Echo is a word that carries the abiding, intuitive sense of the way the essence of our world is lived out through some form of foundational repetition and reciprocation: whatever we have to say, will be said again, in a slightly different way, by myself or by others, but whatever we have to say will also, somehow, be answered.
Echo tells us that whatever we give out to the world, will be returned to us, in ways we only half-recognize; what looks like self-repetition is actually a deepening and gradual revelation. In an echo, we are granted the ability to hear our own voice, in its truth and in its falsity. Echo also echoes with our intuitions around time: whatever we generate will come back to us in succeeding generations, everything sent away or lost will return, one way or another, in a beautiful, skewed, not quite symmetrical version of its own first issuance; echo is the sense and the deep unconscious relief that we will eventually, if we listen closely to far off things, be answered, and hope above hope, answered in the way we wish to be answered.
Echo is always a beautiful surprise and comes simultaneously from within our own body and from a reverberating, far-off somewhere else, arriving through multiple and simultaneous distances all at the same time. In creating an echo I stand for a moment at the centre of myriad variations of my own voice. I find I can become a creator of many conversations from one originating voice. As in my everyday life so in the experience of echo, one word from me sets off a multiplicity of responses.
Echo is also foreboding, the annunciation of absence; the empty room where children ran, but also, in that absence, the invitation to go back and meet, the memory, the loss, the life that once surrounded us but now beckons to be held in a different way.
-excerpt from the new essay ‘ECHO’ from Consolations II - available now
'Echo' was a delight to write and along with 'Eclipse' and 'Moon' seemed to write itself amidst the more intense dramas involved in completing many of the other essays. Our own senses are indeed surrounded by extraordinary phenomena every day, many of them we find to our astonishment, self generated or magnified by our own listening and watching presence....DW
Beautiful, very lovely thank you. Have ordered my copy of Consolations Two, a treat to take my time over and savour x