Being weird: Having one foot in both worlds

When I first read Michael Meade’s words that, ‘elders are weird’, I was a little shocked and thought to myself, that doesn’t sound very appealing.

But he had my attention. Which is why I read on and discovered his explanation. You see, when I grew up ‘weird’ only meant one thing…people who were just considered slightly (or very) odd. They didn’t fit into the average behaviours of life. Weird was just one click to the left of being thought of as eccentric. People smiled at eccentric, but they took a step of avoidance from people who were weird. The kept a polite distance. What Meade went on to explain was that weird, or wyrrd, as it had been spelt, had originally meant something completely different. It meant someone who had one foot on the earth and one foot in the realm of the divine.

‘The weird or wyrrd is the way we are spun from within, the way we are shaped and styled and aimed at life…. Our inner weirdness is also our divine connection. Our essential task in life is to awaken to the way that the eternal would speak through us, to learn to live out our intended personality and the inner weirdness that makes us a unique torchbearer of the flame of life. Only from this ground of destiny can an individual life truly make sense in the end’[1]

This original definition caused me to think two things about the divine. Firstly, when he speaks of the divine, he is talking about there being something beyond the visible, the purely the human realm. Whilst the word is difficult for some, it is, at the very least, a universal perspective. Humans are not the centre and CEO of the world, or the universe, or the eco-system, they are an interdependent part of it. They only have their truest meaning by humbly finding their place in this larger story. This is in contrast to seeing everything as our resource to consume, control and destroy. Reality is interdependent and interrelated. The second thought about the divine is that this ‘other’ that we often call the transcendent, or sacred, or numinous, or higher consciousness, is the centre from which all consciousness and meaning is derived. McGilchrist’s work from a neuroscience perspective is that science has shown that consciousness sits at the heart of the universe[2].

We are currently living in a world that is largely flat, dominated by people who only have a foot in one world, who have made a god out of this flatland and that everything that is going awry right now is a symptom of that. This was certainly the view we were warned about by writers like Dostoyevsky.

‘If God does not exist everything is permitted[3]’

 Or, Cheng when he says,

‘The truth is that when any notion of the sacred is banished it is impossible for humans to establish a true hierarchy of values[4]’

Or, the Sufi poet Rumi,

‘Why in the plenitude of Gods Universe have you chosen to fall asleep in such a small dark prison?’[5]

And by Nobel writer and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his Templeton Address,

“Men have forgotten God.” The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century….Yet we have grown used to this kind of world; we even feel at home in it”[6].

If reality is indeed the deep inter-relationship between the seen and the unseen, the visible and the sacred, then more than ever we need weird people to help us recover our bearings; recover a courageous principle-centred, values-driven engagement with life now and going forwards; a perspective from Rumi’s ‘plenitude of Gods Universe’ rather than ‘asleep in such a small dark prison’. It was because of the weirdness of the native American elders that they made each decision based on the impact it would have, seven generations into the future. Their weirdness, their deep relationship with both earth and transcendence, gave them the power, the vision and courage to shape the now.

Some of us have lost public confidence in our own weirdness. Maybe the, ‘we don’t do God’, of the new atheists, had a larger effect on us than we should have allowed.

Some of us have mistaken our right revulsion for the many aspects of religion that have been somewhere between dangerous and ridiculous and stopped there, without being curious about whether there is more that lies beneath and beyond our own limited consciousness.

Meade’s conviction is that an elder’s wisdom and perspective come from their weirdness. We can understand this better by looking at other groups of people who have also been labelled weird, for example, artists. Van Gogh, Blake, Da Vinci were all weird, not eccentric, because their very genius was born out of having a foot in two dimensions of reality. Last week I stood in front of Candido Portinari’s painting Migrants 1944, at the Royal Academy in London and the power of the art took my breath away. In a single instance it captured the horror, travesty and injustice of displaced and shamed people. It had a deeper moral imagination about the current debates on migration than anything I have heard in the last ten years. Policy should be formed in front of a painting created by weird artists! The artist, like Polinari, have one foot on earth and the other in the eternal.

Or, let me tell you about my friend the artist Tim Steward. I’ve followed and bought Tim’s art for over a decade. In his earlier work he was well known for his charcoal and ink drawings of famous buildings from Oxford to London and beyond. But his genius was not just to draw the building that we all see and know, but to discover the life, the essence of that building we are present to. He captured the essential lines of the structure, but also the essence of the experience of standing in front of a building so full of history and life, whether it was St Pauls Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament or the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford. His art reveals the soul of the building. One foot on earth and the other in the divine, we see the familiar in whole new ways. It is the artists version of James Baldwins insight that every person walking down the street that passes you, could be you. That everyone you meet is made in the image of the divine. You see the life, the essence, in everyone you meet today.

In more recent years Tim has been painting a section of the Cornish coast. But he doesn’t just paint what we would see in our walk along the dramatic cliff tops and ever-changing seascape. He goes to Cornwall for weeks at a time and to start with he will spend days, simply walking, sitting, breathing and making sketches. He is looking for the life within the familiar. The depth and essence within the known. Only when he has touched the soul of what he sees, only when it has got ‘into him’ and only then does he translate that experience to canvas. (Watch him at work) Tim is a deeply values-driven, and you could say normal individual, but Tim is also weird in the best and truest sense of the word.

The weirdness of artists and elders and anyone who has a foot in two worlds, is that they are involved in a rediscovery of a more complete and potent perspective of life today. It is a deeper wisdom, a higher consciousness-shifting and transformational approach to a weird-hungry world right now.

I long for the recovery of weird politicians, weird leaders of business and organisations, weird teachers and other people whose power (contribution, impact, influence), comes from having one foot in the more-than, the eternal, the transcendent, the beyond and the other foot in Monday mornings reality.

Trevor Waldock March 2024

[1] “We are each woven into the common world of time and space, yet we are also secretly tied to things eternal. We each have a foot in time and a toehold in eternity; we have a foot in each world and a responsibility to both. We are made of the warp and woof of fate and destiny which taken together comprise that which is truly weird and inherently unique about us. Each life has its own weirdness, its indelible inner pattern and essential uniqueness that allow it to truly stand out from others. Weird or wyrrd comes from old roots that include the German werden, meaning “to become, to grow.” The wyrrd is the way we are spun from within, the way we are shaped and styled and aimed at life. The wyrrd refers to that which we must become if we are to become our true selves. Our inner weirdness is also our divine connection. Our essential task in life is to awaken to the way that the eternal would speak through us, to learn to live out our intended personality and the inner weirdness that makes us a unique torchbearer of the flame of life. Only from this ground of destiny can an individual life truly make sense in the end.”   Michael Meade’s Fate & Destiny:

[2] Iain McGilchrist  The Matter With Things   Vols 1 & 2  Perspectiva Press 2021

[3] quoted in Cheng 2013 p58

[4] ibid

[5] quoted in the Mathnawi 1977

[6] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "Men Have Forgotten God" Speech | National Review 02/03/2023