Reverie

is a rare and neglected state in our times

Reverie is always despised by those do not like the broad freedom it grants us from other people’s wishes and other people’s control. Those who wish to control other’s lives and to make them conforming members of a classroom, an office or an army do not like the way reverie puts us beyond the bounds, not only of the controlling minds of others, but also beyond the part of our own mind that is easily manipulated by others.

Photo: © David Whyte

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REVERIE

carries the same, beautiful, half-awake, half-asleep sense in its sound as it does in its dream-like meaning. Reverie is a rare and neglected state in our times, asking us to pay attention to simultaneous inner and outer horizons: with rested bodily depth and with a broad listening amplitude. Reverie is an antidote to much of the over-focus, over-delineation and branding of our identities, most especially in an age where we are drawn like moths to a flame, burned and distracted by the Internet, from one state of narrow focus to another. 

The combined state of rest and broad diffused attention that reverie implies, and the luxuriant sense the word communicates, invites us to inhabit our bodies, our intellects and our imaginations simultaneously, where neither the mind, the body, nor the imagination are given precedence yet all of them are felt and inhabited in deeper ways that are not possible when we attempt to focus on them in separation.