u/PhilosophyOfLanguage

Michelangelo must have reflected on the relationship between the Virgin Mary and Jesus a lot — that’s why he created three Pietàs in his lifetime.

His final Pietà in Milan, called Rondanini, is unfinished — and it is the most mysterious of them all. It depicts two pictures at the same time, depending on the angle of the viewer: the dead Christ supported by the Virgin Mary — or, shockingly, the Virgin Mary supported by Christ.

One cannot tell who is holding whom. Is the mother holding the Son, or is the Son holding the mother from beyond death? Michelangelo’s idea is simple yet profound — and it echoes Dante’s words about the Virgin Mary in Paradiso:

“O virgin mother, daughter of thy own Son.”

The one who gave birth to God is the daughter of her own Son. Michelangelo captures the key motif of Nativity: when we give birth to God in this world, we are always sustained by the very child we bear. We become the child of our own child. That to which we give birth, in turn, gives birth to us.

That vulnerable little thing I bring into the world becomes the very womb in which I myself am formed anew. Whoever offers his or her body as a conduit for God’s self-revelation in the world is reborn in the very act of that offering.

As Meister Eckhart said:

“What good is it to me if Mary gave birth to the Son of God fourteen hundred years ago, and I do not also give birth to the Son of God in my time…?”

I can still remember a train ride I took in Russia during the turbulent 1990s. It was a strange time of new hope, total chaos, and rampant crime. As I sat on my bunk, I saw several drunken soldiers enter the car. Everyone grew uneasy — everyone instinctively knew what that meant: trouble.

And trouble it was. They were loud, insolent, and bullied whoever crossed their path. Calling the police in those days was pointless, especially on a train. So I prayed.

Then something unexpected happened. At one of the stations, a mother carrying a baby entered the car and sat directly across from the drunken soldiers. The effect was staggering. The soldiers quieted down, offered the mother a few good-natured compliments, and gradually settled in to sleep, whispering among themselves, “Hush, don’t wake the child.”

I was speechless. Peace had been restored by the most vulnerable and defenseless person in the car. What kind of strange power did that child wield? The peace of the entire train seemed to rest in someone who had only just entered the world. Who, in the end, was holding whom?

The mystery of a mother holding a child runs deep in our souls. It tells us that the world is held together not by the big and powerful, but by the small and vulnerable thing we bring into the world through love. That is what Michelangelo must have sensed so keenly at the end of his earthly journey.

If we want more peace in the world, we must give birth to vulnerable things. These are the things that truly hold the world together. If we imagine that peace can be restored through the accumulation of power, we will reap more chaos.

What we need is a mother with a child entering the train car and sitting quietly beside the chaos. We look at her, and suddenly something snaps in our troubled hearts — our beastly passions begin to subside.

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Richard Rohr says that the easiest way to distract people from the real battle is to give them a spectacle. In a spectacle, the field is neatly divided into “us” and “them.” Evil is always out there, clearly marked and easily identifiable.

“The spectacle, though an attraction, is the least artistic of all the parts, and has the least to do with the art of poetry.”
— Aristotle

The spectacle diminishes our awareness of the evil within ourselves. The flashier the scene before our eyes, the less attention we pay to the subtleties of the plot. In a spectacle, evil is externalized and then “destroyed” — eliminated completely. The good guys prevail, and we leave with the feeling that evil itself has been conquered. But it has not.

In real-life drama, which is rarely spectacular, the true battle with evil begins the moment we realize that evil is part of us. Harry Potter fought an external enemy for several books before discovering his inner connection to Lord Voldemort. He realized that he had to confront Voldemort within himself. The two were inextricably bound together.

It is easy to fight evil when it appears outside of us. The flashy external battle often becomes a surrogate conflict that distracts us from noticing the subtle workings of evil within the soul. And inwardly, evil never presents itself as evil. According to Dante Alighieri, the evil we carry within always disguises itself as good.

Inner evil is never overcome through direct confrontation. The more aggressively we fight “it,” the stronger it becomes. The inner drama is not a spectacle. There is no “us” and “them.” There is nothing external to conquer and no one to “eliminate.” When we identify evil within ourselves and attack it head-on, we lose. It always returns stronger than before.

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote:

“You will never know your angels unless you tame your demons.”

Voldemort cannot simply be externalized and destroyed. He can only be tamed. And we tame him by embracing the pain beneath him. As Rilke also wrote:

“Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something helpless that wants help from us.”

Our inner evil is usually some good thing made ultimate. We take a good part of the soul and turn it into our “Precious” — our ultimate source of happiness. We begin to believe that if only we possess that one thing, everything will be well. Our deepest fear becomes the fear of losing it.

Again and again, human beings are destroyed not by their weaknesses, but by their gifts. Melkor fell not because he lacked greatness, but because he deified his extraordinary gifts. Fëanor fell for the same reason. The pattern repeats itself endlessly: Fall of Númenor, Babylon, Lucifer, Icarus, Cain, Anakin Skywalker, Judas Iscariot. Whenever we do evil, we are usually staring at some perceived good — and worshiping it.

Real-life drama is therefore not about renouncing evil, but about renouncing the good we have made ultimate. It is not about the spectacle of fighting an external battle. It is about inward surrender.

“Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit.”

What is the good thing I cling to so tightly that the mere thought of losing it causes pain? That is precisely what must be surrendered to God. The true dividing line between good and evil lies in whether or not we have relinquished the good we have elevated into an idol.

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In an old parable, a man carried two water jars suspended from a pole across his shoulders. One jar was new and perfect; the other was old and cracked and leaked water along the path.

Every day, by the time the man reached his master’s house, the cracked jar was almost empty. The new jar boasted of its usefulness, while the cracked jar was ashamed of its flaws.

One day the cracked jar said to the man apologetically:

“I am defective. I lose most of the water through my cracks before you reach the house.”

The man replied:

“Yes, but when was the last time you looked at your side of the path? I know all about your cracks, so I scattered seeds there. Every day, when you thought you were merely leaking water, you were watering flowers. Look at this road now!”

The jar looked and was amazed. His side of the path was covered with the most beautiful flowers imaginable.

“Because of you, the master always has fresh flowers on his table. Your cracks have leaked so much beauty into the world that people come from far away just to walk along this path. The say it fills them with joy like nothing else.”

Old age is the perfect time to leak beauty into the world. We think our cracks make us useless; nothing could be further from the truth. The older we get, the more wounds, flaws, and imperfections we carry — but these are the very cracks through which the light pours out.

Little do we know that someone has sown seeds along our path. These seeds can sprout only if we water them through our wounds. Our wounds are sacred. They are conduits of living water — unique life experiences that can nourish the seeds of new life.

Whole jars carry ordinary water; broken jars carry living water.

“One of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side… bringing a sudden flow of blood and water.” — John 19:34

By that water, we have been healed. The mystery of healing is that it can come only through the Wound. The older we get, the more sacred our wounds become — and the more healing beauty we can spill.

For the world to flower, people must leak the beauty of their cracks. If we hide them or patch them up with tape, our beauty cannot flow out. When we hide our cracks, our path remains dry and barren. We become rigid and closed in on ourselves — crackpots rather than cracked pots.

When we open them, streams of living water gush forth, and everything begins to blossom.

We do not think much of old age. We think of it as diminishing. And it is diminishing — but in an enlarging way. As G. K. Chesterton put it:

“How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it.”
— Orthodoxy

In an old parable, a man carried two water jars suspended from a pole across his shoulders. One jar was new and perfect; the other was old and cracked and leaked water along the path.

Every day, by the time the man reached his master’s house, the cracked jar was almost empty. The new jar boasted of its usefulness, while the cracked jar was ashamed of its flaws.

One day the cracked jar said to the man apologetically:

“I am defective. I lose most of the water through my cracks before you reach the house.”

The man replied:

“Yes, but when was the last time you looked at your side of the path? I know all about your cracks, so I scattered seeds there. Every day, when you thought you were merely leaking water, you were watering flowers. Look at this road now!”

The jar looked and was amazed. His side of the path was covered with the most beautiful flowers imaginable.

“Because of you, the master always has fresh flowers on his table. Your cracks have leaked so much beauty into the world that people come from far away just to walk along this path. The say it fills them with joy like nothing else.”

Old age is the perfect time to leak beauty into the world. We think our cracks make us useless; nothing could be further from the truth. The older we get, the more wounds, flaws, and imperfections we carry — but these are the very cracks through which the light pours out.

Little do we know that someone has sown seeds along our path. These seeds can sprout only if we water them through our wounds. Our wounds are sacred. They are conduits of living water — unique life experiences that can nourish the seeds of new life.

Whole jars carry ordinary water; broken jars carry living water.

“One of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side… bringing a sudden flow of blood and water.” — John 19:34

By that water, we have been healed. The mystery of healing is that it can come only through the Wound. The older we get, the more sacred our wounds become — and the more healing beauty we can spill.

For the world to flower, people must leak the beauty of their cracks. If we hide them or patch them up with tape, our beauty cannot flow out. When we hide our cracks, our path remains dry and barren. We become rigid and closed in on ourselves — crackpots rather than cracked pots.

When we open them, streams of living water gush forth, and everything begins to blossom.

We do not think much of old age. We think of it as diminishing. And it is diminishing — but in an enlarging way. As G. K. Chesterton put it:

“How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it.”
— Orthodoxy

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In Purgatorio, Dante shows us something striking. The souls circle the mountain in their slow ascent, still burdened by their sins, each step a struggle. And then, in Canto 26, he describes an unexpected scene: two groups of souls meet — and instead of passing by, they rush toward one another.

They greet each other with kisses and embraces — looking somewhat funny — like ants touching antennae as they pass.

“Coming down the middle of that road of flames was another group of souls approaching those who had spoken to me. As I watched, both groups rushed to greet each other with a brief hug and kiss. I was reminded of how ants nose up to each other when they meet, as though to find out which way to go, or how they have fared.”

When a soul is on its way to Paradise, it longs to be embraced — to be made whole. Every step along the way reminds us that something within us is still broken. And when we become too fixated on that brokenness, we stop moving. When our gaze is fixed on what is wrong, we forget Heaven — and betray our calling: to become light, to fly.

We long for someone to run toward us, to embrace us, and to say:
You have done well. Do not give up. I know who you are. Believe me: you must fly.

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The history of mankind began in the Garden — an earthly Paradise (a “walled enclosure” in Old Persian). Within that enchanted circle, everything thrived — plants, trees, birds of air, beasts of the field, and humans. Outside of that enclosure, there was chaos — a wild forest full of untamed creatures.

When Adam and Eve were evicted from the Garden, they found themselves in the wild forest. Curiously, all fairy-tales and legends in all cultures capture this motif of the forest as a wild and untamed place.

In Japanese folklore, the forest is home to kami (spirits), both good and bad. In stories like Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood, the forest is a dark, mysterious place that tests the characters’ courage. In The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, forests like Mirkwood represent both danger and infestation by evil forces. Dante finds himself in the “dark forest” where he meets three wild beasts: the lion, the lynx, and the she-wolf.

Forests are full of strange and frightening creatures. In the Old Forest near Buckland, some trees were possessed by evil spirits, like Old Man Willow. In George MacDonald’s Phantastes, there was a malevolent Ash indwelt by an evil spirit. In Russian folklore, Baba Yaga lives in the middle of the dark forest in her hut on a chicken’s leg.

Outside the enchanted circle of Eden, the world is a dangerous place, and yet, there’s always someone whose presence dispels the darkness of the darkest wood. Tom Bombadil’s song renders Old Man Willow helpless. In Phantastes, Anodos is saved from the evil Ash by a beautiful Beech tree woman.

Hansel and Gretel are saved by a friendly swan. In the old Baba Yaga stories, the characters are often saved by an apple tree, a river, and a furnace. The presence of old Tom Bombadil-like characters in the “forest of the world” is not accidental. They are a prefiguration of the coming of the Second Adam,

“Who is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

The first Adam’s fall turned the Garden into a forest; the Second Adam turns all forests into a Garden. His coming restores the heavenly and earthly hierarchy. The elements themselves, though wild and insidious in and of themselves, align with this Voice. The Second Adam restores the first Adam to what he should have been — Master.

Tom Bombadil’s presence is the presence of Adam as he should have been. His word is enough to instill harmony. His song tames wild creatures and drives out evil spirits. In the presence of Aslan, even the wild Bacchus becomes harmless and friendly.

In Prince Caspian, Susan and Lucy are caught up in a redeemed Bacchanalia, and Susan says,

“I wouldn’t have felt very safe with Bacchus and all his wild girls if we’d met them without Aslan.”

“I should think not,” replied Lucy.

There’s only one difference between a forest and a Garden — the absence or presence of the Master. He lives in a small cottage on the edge of the Old Forest near the Withywindle River. He walks around his domain every day with a song on his lips, and all the wild things, all the tempestuous elements align with his Song.

His house is a safe haven, an earthly Paradise, a walled enclosure. His domain is a Garden as long as he is there. There’s more to gardens than meets the eye — they are a metaphor for the soul. In the absence of Love, the soul is torn apart by tempestuous forces. But when Love comes singing from around the corner, all is well with my soul.

“Love is the bridge between you and everything, soothing the wild tempests within your soul.” Rumi

And:

“The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of our flaws. In that love, the storms within us are quieted.” — Victor Hugo*, Les Miserables*

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Sometimes I fly in my dreams. From within the dream, I always know how to do it. It feels natural — until something stirs fear or doubt. Then I can no longer take off.

When Dante and Beatrice reach the Earthly Paradise — the summit of Purgatorio — they begin to rise through the sphere of fire with great speed. Dante is amazed and asks how this can be. Beatrice seems surprised by the question: how could it be otherwise?

“You really should be no more amazed that you’re flying upward than you would be at seeing water fall from a mountain’s height to its base. And since you are now free from everything that would hold you down, if you had remained there on earth, that would be as strange as a flame that never moves.”

Having been purified of everything that once held you down — everything that kept you stuck in your “dark forest” — how could you not rise upward, swift as lightning, toward the Source of all light?

Beatrice says that what we call gravity is not so much a physical force as the weight of earthly burdens. Once that burden is lifted, ascent is no longer unnatural — it is as natural as sparks flying upward.

When we lay down our earthly cares, we become lighter than air and fly. Love pulls us upwards with an irresistible force of anti-gravity.

Everyone in Purgatorio knows this strange dynamic. At the beginning of the ascent, the climb is painfully slow and excruciatingly hard. The weight of earthly cares and attachments feels almost unbearable. And yet, the souls encourage one another: Keep going. It will get easier.

And it does. The higher you ascend, the lighter you become — and the faster you move. By the time you reach the summit, you lift off and fly straight toward Heaven, hardly knowing how — as if in a dream. Just before that moment, Dante describes a curious experience:

“All the while, Beatrice stood there entranced as she looked upon the eternal spheres of the cosmos. But I, having looked away from them, I now fixed my eyes on her. And as I feasted upon her radiance… I cannot possibly explain in mere words what was happening to me except to say that I was being ‘transhumanized.’”

Dante couldn’t find words to express what it was:

“As a result, I cannot say precisely whether it was my soul or my body — or both — that rose upward. You alone know, O Blessed Love, by Whose light I was lifted up.”

Flying is natural to the one who beholds the divine Light. The Light makes them light. Their very nature is changed — they become “transhumanized.” Beatrice explains that all created beings are called to return to their proper “ports” in the great sea of being — lo gran mar de l’essere.

We are pulled downward by the gravity of earthly cares. The more burdens we carry, the heavier we become — and the slower we move. In Inferno, the soul’s motion grows increasingly sluggish the closer one gets to the center of hell. There, locked in eternal ice, dwells Lucifer himself — the symbol of a frozen soul.

To the one who beholds the Light, gravity becomes unnatural. Flying becomes the norm. You don’t know whether it’s you soul or body — or both — rise upward. When you cast your cares on God, you are lifted; you are returning to your proper “port” in the great sea of being.

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Incidentally, in the Greek of Romans 12:2: “Do not be conformed to this present age, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind,” we read: “Do not be suschēmatizesthe to this present age, but be metamorphousthe by the renewal of your mind.”

The first verb suschēmatizesthe (translated as “conform”) literally means to follow a scheme. The second verb *metamorphousthe (*translated as “be transformed”) literally means to change your form — undergo metamorphosis. The ethics of heaven is metamorphosis — not following schemes.

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Two things my 4-month-old kitten teaches me about life:

1. When you wake up, play — what else is there to do?
2. When you don’t play, sleep — restore energy for play.

Johan Huizinga’s words fit here beautifully:

“Play is older than culture... animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.” — Homo Ludens

Animals were playing long before humans existed. Since time immemorial, leviathans frolicked, fish leapt, ducks ducked, horses rolled on their backs, eagles soared, and frogs swelled, and magpies gathered shiny objects.

For animals, play is not optional — that’s their mode of existence. Play is older than life itself because life on earth was made in play. In Proverbs 8:22, Wisdom says:

“When he appointed the foundations of the earth: then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him.”

The word for “rejoice” here is śāḥaq, which means play, laugh, or dance. The Wisdom of God is play, laugh, and dance — that’s what it did before aught else was made. The world appeared in play, laugh, and dance.

That is why it continues to play, laugh, and dance — without being taught. The human being is the only creature who forgets how. Unlike my kitten, I have fallen out of alignment with Being.

To be wise means to be attuned to Being — to the Wisdom that is playing, laughing, and dancing. It means to catch that which has already caught you. Play is already going on — all I need to do is to catch it. To catch the ball coming my way. Play is not something I initiate; it’s something that catches me unawares — and invites me to join.

Its pull is irresistible. Every once in a while, I hear a song or a tune that catches me. I can’t get it out of my head. Not that I want to — on the contrary, I want to keep humming it.

It plays in my mind as I fall asleep, and when I wake up, I catch myself still humming it. I’ve been caught. And I like it. I pick up my guitar and play it. I record it on my phone. I send it to my friends. They may add something of their own to the tune — or simply rejoice with me. It is in the nature of play to invite others to join.

What happens when you are caught in divine play? Suddenly, you realize that you are perfectly free and can choose to stop playing any moment. No one is forcing you. But you don’t want to stop. In divine play, your will and divine will become one will.

You feel you have been invited; someone made room for you to step in and join the dance. Curiously, the patristic term for Trinity — perichoresis — literally means “circle dance.” The prefix περί (peri) means around, and χώρησις (choresis) means “to make room” (or dance).

The nature of dance is to make room for someone to join in. The nature of the Trinity, as a circle dance, is to make room for a fourth one — you — to enter. The circle expands indefinitely.

It is hardly surprising that, in the early centuries, someone who once participated in the dance but then stepped out of it was called “apostate” (apostátēs). Apostátēs simply means “someone who stepped out.” Apostasy was seen as a refusal to be in the circle dance.

Johan Huizinga writes:

“For us the chief point of interest is the place where the game is played. Generally it is a simple circle... The circle as such, however, has a magic significance.”

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When people ask me, “What is the most important thing in translating a book?” I answer: translating from the end — not from the beginning.

No kidding. It’s what my editor taught me back in the 90s. When I first started out as a translator, I thought I could begin at line one and simply translate words and sentences as they came.

But it doesn’t work that way. A text is not words and sentences. That’s what it consists of — not what it is. His advice was simple: read several chapters ahead — or better yet, read the whole book to the end — and only then begin at the beginning.

When you know the end, the right words will come of themselves. I followed his advice, and it worked really well — the editor was much happier with my work. What my editor knew intuitively, Plato expressed plainly:

“We do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection.” — Plato, Meno

Plato held that the immortal soul once beheld the perfect Forms and now simply recollects what it has seen in heaven. We call it learning, but it is re-cognition — knowing again.

The soul’s knowledge is holistic — it once beheld the Whole; it saw Perfection. And so, when it encounters something on earth, it does not need to assemble knowledge from fragments. It recognizes the Whole.

When you see the Whole, you know the meaning of every part. When the Whole is forgotten, analysis inevitably starts — reality must be fragmented and then re-assembled from bits and pieces.

According to Plato, when the soul is “fully winged,” it soars upward and beholds true realities; but when it loses its wings, it forgets. Yet through beauty it is stirred, reminded, and begins to recollect again.

When the soul is “fully winged,” it soars back to Heaven and beholds perfection. Then, everything on earth begins to make sense. The soul doesn’t need to collect the pieces of fragmented knowledge — it simply re-collects. We can only make sense of the parts when we already understand the Whole.

This is how Martin Heidegger put it:

“Only he who already understands can listen.”

We never simply listen — we listen for something. We listen for what aligns with our prior understanding. When I speak with a friend, I can hear only what I already understand. What I do not understand will not be heard; it will be filtered out as noise.

Our ability to perceive is shaped by our prior understanding. But where does this understanding come from? It comes from the soul’s ability to behold what Plato called the perfect Forms.

To know, the soul must be fully winged and feathered — stirred and ravished by the contemplation of Beauty. Only then does the art of making sense begin. We can “read” and understand every line of creation only when the soul “re-collects” all of it at once in the Spirit.

Someone on LinkedIn asked me: “As a translator, why do you think AI makes mistakes in translation?” I thought about it it and said: “Because it has never beheld Platonic ideas and cannot grasp the Whole. Strictly speaking, AI is not an intellect — precisely because it has nothing to recollect.”

Its “knowledge” is assembled from individual bits of data — without seeing the Heavenly Pattern. So I asked ChatGPT if it could see Platonic ideas, and it replied:

“I don’t have direct access to metaphysical realities. I don’t “see” Forms the way Plato imagined the soul glimpsing them before birth. I process language, patterns, concepts, and symbols that humans provide me. So in the strict Platonic sense, I cannot truly grasp Ideas the way a soul might.”

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They say: “If you meet the Buddha by the road, kill him.”

It simply means that if you worship any fixed idea outside your immediate experience, it is an illusion — destroy it. Don’t worship the map; walk the path. If something or someone hinders your “direct seeing,” let it go.

In an article I found on LinkedIn titled “Every Company Now Sounds Like ChatGPT— and That’s the Biggest Brand Opportunity in a Decade,” the author says that an analysis of 73 corporate documents has revealed the consistent use of the same syntactic constructions across multiple brands. Brands begin to sound the same:

Language models are trained to produce the statistical average of everything ever written, so when enough companies route their communications through them, every company starts sounding like the average of every other company.

Ahrefs analyzed 900,000 new web pages and found 74% contained AI-generated content. As more and more brands use ChatGPT, more and more brands begin sounding like ChatGPT.

The author concludes: “Today, sounding different becomes the rarest competitive advantage a company can have. The company with real personality, earned conviction, and concrete specificity stands out like a bonfire in a field of flashlights.”

AI makes you sound like AI — and makes you lose your voice. When we allow AI to speak for us, we become mute. When we meet a new person, we instinctively look for something unique about them. We call a person interesting only if they have a voice — not when they sound like everyone else.

Having a voice means to see and describe things in a way no one else does. I don’t want my friends to sound the same today as they did yesterday. If they are alive, they must have new experiences today worth sharing. And when they do, it makes me come alive too.

When we meet someone who sounds average, we quickly forget what they say. Yet we know — almost instinctively — that there are no average people. If someone sounds average, it simply means they have lost their voice: for some reason, they don’t speak from their own experience.

Unlike AI, we have direct experience. We are not merely a database of theoretical knowledge. We have cooked an omelet a thousand times — and we know how to make it, not as information, but as an embodied practice. And we can speak of it in our own voice.

The world desperately lacks voices because we keep delegating our voice to the Buddha by the road. If something doesn’t allow you to speak from your own heart, life, and experience — kill it. The world doesn’t need the average — only the real.

The real will be remembered. Real people are remembered, real names and brands are remembered. They can’t help being remembered — because they call. Interestingly, the word voice is related to the Latin vocare, “to call.”

To have a voice means to call. If I encounter something or someone and nothing calls to me, I will quickly forget it. We are living in a unique time — people are beginning to sense that being fully human pays, while being less than human doesn’t.

If I want to have a voice — to call, to awaken — I must speak from my direct experience. Without reference to any Buddha on the road.

“Memory favors the company that said something pointed… something that made them think ‘these people actually know what they’re talking about.’ Corporate America is converging on a single voice. The brands that opt out will own the next decade.” — Quote from the above-mentioned article on LinkedIn.

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About a month ago, I got up around 6 a.m. in Galveston, Texas, and walked straight to the shore, then out to the tip of the breakwater to watch the pale gleam of sunrise slowly spreading over the ocean.

As I watched the sizzling surf, I thought of Hesiod’s myth of Oceanus, the personification of the great, earth-encircling river. In the Theogony, Oceanus is the eldest of the Titans, the son of Earth (Gaia) and Heaven (Ouranos). I raised my eyes to the brightening horizon and saw exactly that — the Ocean emerging from the thin line between Heaven and Earth.

The ancient myth suddenly stopped being an abstract story in a textbook and became a living reality unfolding before my eyes. Of the many things that Hesiod tells about Oceanus, one stood out the most — that Oceanus did not join his siblings, the other Titans, in their rebellion against the Olympian gods.

He remained neutral during the Titanomachy, the war of the Titans against the Olympian gods. The Titans believed they would do a better job ruling the cosmos. Eventually, they were defeated and cast by Zeus into Tartarus.

Alexei Losev, a Soviet-era philosopher, defined myth as a “symbolically realized person.” Myth, he wrote, is “the essence of a person represented in a word, a picture, or a sculpture.” I stood there, thinking: “What does Oceanus symbolize in a human being?”

An answer came almost out of the churning abyss itself: each person has within them a part that does not join in the rebellion of the Titans against the Most High, even though we all, in one way or another, seek to dethrone God from His holy hill.

The Titans represent that part of us which wants to seize the throne of God. They were ancient giants who believed they possessed such power that they could replace the gods through their “titanic” effort. Yet every “Titanic” is doomed to be swallowed by the abyss — by Tartarus, that depth below all depths, deeper even than the ocean floor itself.

But what about Oceanus? Hesiod does not explicitly state why Oceanus did not rebel along with the Titans. Yet as I stood there on the breakwater, watching his foamy splashes against the rock, an answer came of its own accord: because he is always playing.

When you play, you are happy. And when you are happy, you do not want to fight the gods. You want to join them — to take part in their cosmic play. I did not have to reason this out; it came to me as I watched the heaving abyss splash and sputter at my feet. Oceanus was playing with me.

There was nothing abstract about it. I could feel it. The play was happening before my eyes. Oceanus is not seeking to become great — he is already great. He is not striving to establish himself on Olympus — he is already full of primordial life churning in his veins.

The only thing that can keep us from joining the Titans and ending up in Tartarus is to join divine play. Divine play was there before aught else was made. When we lose sight of it, we begin to build Titanics, Towers of Babel, and AI. We want to compete, to win, to strive, to seize control. Yet the end of all titanic efforts is always the same — the abyss of our own making.

How do you find divine play? You don’t. It finds you. Hesiod writes:

“He is happy whom the Muses love. For though a man has sorrow and grief in his soul, yet when the servant of the Muses sings, at once he forgets his dark thoughts and remembers not his troubles. Such is the holy gift of the Muses to men.”

Whatever trouble we find ourselves in, we can, instead of storming Olympus, attune ourselves to the song of the Muses and sing along. And lo and behold, the holy gift of the Muses to mortals is this: we at once forget our dark thoughts and remember our troubles no more. Why?

Because divine play connects us to the Source of primordial Life. This Life is like a mighty river of peace encircling the world. In many accounts, Oceanus willingly gave up his prominence over the known seas to Poseidon, following the Titanomachy. He and his wife, Tethys, did not fight for control over the Mediterranean — they were quite content to remain in their domain at the edges of the world.

They did not need to compete for supremacy or greatness. When you sing along with the Muses, you are content to remain who you are — even at the edges of the world.