If we’re paying attention, awe and amazement appear. The experience is, I believe, what happens when a farmer walks into the field one day and is speechless with the beauty of it all. Or a band puts together a beyond-amazing set even though the musicians and the music are, on the surface, the same as they were the week before. As Bateson says, “It’s the unseen coalescence that brings about vitality.”
I know enough to know and also deeply appreciate that others will have experienced the huddle very differently than I did and that there’s great merit to their views as well. But for me, it was pretty magical. It’s possible that it might have even been what Nora Bateson calls aphanipoiesis. Bateson made up the term, because, as she says there was no word to describe it. It is, she says, “a new word for an aspect of a living process.” Aphanipoiesis, as she tells it, describes a “way in which life coalesces toward vitality in unseen ways.” The term is, itself, a coming together of two words: aphanis is from the Greek, meaning “obscured, unseen, unnoticed”; poiesis means “to bring forth, to make.” As I’ve begun to assimilate the idea of aphanipoesis, I’ve come to believe that while it's not impossible to see it, it does require us to look more deeply, to embrace complexity, context, and interrelatedness in ways that most of us have not been trained to do. A great deal of work often goes into keeping things from coming apart, but maybe we would be wise to work positively for the future believing that over time things will come together.
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