Boughs & vines, entwined

As I free fall into a carnival of New Age stereotypes, choosing my words with care is a welcome, grounding, chore.

One new-to-me concept of great utility is the container, with which we hold space, for a notion, an intention, a relationship. In Hakomi: relationship, especially the therapeutic relationship between therapist, client, and whoever else is immanent. The therapist fosters the bubble, in which he witnesses and encourages the client to witness and encourage her own healing evolution. Beautiful work, this: right action, right speech, creating the container for precious cargo, the unfolding human soul.

So why does this word grate on my ears, and set my eyes to rolling?

Maybe it's the associations. Containers are what fast food comes in. Containers are piled high in every port, when they're not littering the beach. What needs containing in our world? Radioactive waste, plague vectors, social breakdown, errant desires...

Maybe it's the lineage. Somehow, container is all about the function, good, bad or indifferent. 

Latin continēre, to hold together, keep together, comprehend, contain —OED, as well as the following

Good as far as it goes, until you notice the controlling, reductionist scrutiny, and we're right back to quelling something that wants to escape. I'm drawn to words whose roots grabbed earth before Rome paved the way back to itself across the West. You know, the languages of barbarians, where all of our best four letter words come from. Container, well... marches straight back to Rōma. 

I long for something else, a word freighted with an agency and intention more appropriate to the project, and I've come up with: bower

Old English búr dwelling, etc., corresponding to Old Saxon bûr
A dwelling, habitation, abode... especially, a vague poetic word for an idealized abode

Yes, better, something built, with a lofty intention, to restore something lost, to house ourselves in sylvan splendor (I admit, L. silvānae, goddesses of the woods). But, it gets better:

An inner apartment... especially applied to a lady's private apartment; a boudoir

Thus we imagine a gentle realm of intimacies, of shared secrets away from the harsher, masculine realm of commerce and politics, although this might rightly be challenged and derogated (L. dērogāre to repeal in part, etc.) by feminisms undreamt of in the 14th Century, and only now roiling brows hidden by burqas and chadors...

And, best of all, because it evokes my preferred, long view, transpersonal, ecological memespace

A place closed in or overarched with branches of trees, shrubs, or other plants; a shady recess

Photo: missy_gardenwhimsy

Now we have all the aspects that make bower so attractive to me: a constructed refuge, woven with care over time, from natural elements, to hold the things we love, in a place of mindful intimacy, a soul solacing retreat from all that wounds us, where we abide with all that would heal us. Yay!

I hold a vision of the post-historical future, of the fractal bower of our survival: the great bower of Gaia, tended by a billion loving spirits, sharing bowers of home and garden, each spirit weaving many relationships within and among, embowered by loving regard, and our better angels.