BEFORE ANEVRA

The Circle Was Already Open

By Arven Anevski, in his own words.

I did not set out to write this book.

Before ANEVRA had a name, before there was a dot, before I understood the significance of an open circle, there was simply a period in my life when the world I thought I understood changed very quickly. It began, strangely enough, with extraordinary happiness.

After thirty-one years, and more obstacles than either of us might once have imagined, I married the love of my life. There are some arrivals that carry the weight of the journey towards them. This was one of those. It was not simply a wedding. It was the feeling of finally standing somewhere I had been travelling towards for much of my life. I belonged.

There was something else happening around us that day which I understood only later. For a brief time, the circle of our lives had opened extraordinarily wide. People travelled. Families and friends converged. Different chapters of our lives occupied the same room. People who ordinarily lived at a distance from one another ate together, laughed, danced and remembered together. Experiences arrived too. Stories. Introductions. Reunions. New friendships forming between people who, until that day, had occupied entirely separate parts of our lives. There was something almost euphoric about it. Not simply because we had married, but because for a little while so much that was normally separate had connected.

And then, quite properly, everyone went home. Lives resumed. Houses filled again. Distances returned. Messages became less frequent. The extraordinary gathering gradually gave way to ordinary life. Perhaps some part of me was already wondering why. Why are weddings and funerals among the occasions on which we become so willing to cross the distances between us? Why do celebration and loss remind us to gather in ways that ordinary life so easily allows us to forget? Perhaps I simply wanted the euphoria of that day to last longer. Or perhaps I had glimpsed something about belonging that I was not yet ready to name. Perhaps, without knowing it, I had begun asking a different question. Why should the circle retract or close again?

I did not have those words then. I certainly did not have Anevra. I simply knew that something beautiful had happened when the boundaries of our ordinary lives became more permeable. People had crossed distances. Separate worlds had met. Presence had multiplied rather than diminished as more people entered the room. And I did not want to lose whatever that was. The circle was open before I knew it was a circle.

At our wedding, I had written a reading. It was called To Presence in All Its Forms. It spoke about empty chairs. Not empty because they had been forgotten, but because life does not always allow everyone we love to occupy the same place at the same time. Some people were separated from us by geography. Some circumstance. Some death. Some existed only in the tender territory of what might have been.

Yet somehow, they still belonged. The chair could be empty without the person, or the possibility, or the love, being absent from the circle. At the time, I thought I had written a wedding reading. I did not know where the empty chair would lead.

Not long afterwards, I was injured. The pain was considerable and persistent. I was prescribed powerful medication to manage it. And the world I had only just arrived within seemed suddenly to fracture. There was one moment, no more than a split second, when the pain became so overwhelming that an alternative to continuing entered my mind. It passed. I do not know exactly what carried me through that moment. Perhaps fear. Perhaps courage. Perhaps the knowledge, newly and profoundly felt, that I belonged somewhere. Perhaps love. Perhaps all of them.

What I do know is that something happened afterwards that I have never been able to explain completely. For five consecutive nights, I dreamed. Calling them dreams is accurate. It may also be inadequate. Each night I returned to what seemed to be the same place. I was above the most beautiful blue sea. Before me was an incredible sunset. Below, whales and dolphins broke through the surface of the water. Birds descended from the sky, diving into the sea for fish. The whole scene seemed alive with movement, yet extraordinarily peaceful. Human life was there because I was there. But it was not a human world. It was simply a living one.

And there, in that place, I encountered what I can only describe as a kind of deity. I use that word cautiously. I cannot tell you that I met God. I cannot tell you that I encountered something supernatural. I was injured. I was exhausted. I was in significant pain. I was taking powerful medication. Any or all of those things may have contributed to what happened while I slept.

Perhaps my mind constructed precisely what it needed. Perhaps love, pain, fear, exhaustion and relief assembled themselves into a presence with whom I could speak. Perhaps something happened for which I do not have language. I do not know. That uncertainty matters. Because night after night, I returned. And we talked. We talked about peace. About why human beings who claim to desire peace seem so extraordinarily accomplished at creating the conditions for conflict. We talked about fear, division, belonging and what happens when we begin to see another person as something separate from ourselves. Somewhere within those conversations, another question surfaced: Peace with whom?

For many years, I had carried an increasingly persistent feeling that my energy should be directed towards something greater than myself. Towards the planet. But I was busy building a different kind of business and living a full life, and there was always another demand on my attention, another reason to tell myself I would turn towards it later. But the feeling never left. Looking back, I wonder about the landscape of those dreams. Why the sea? Why whales and dolphins breaking its surface? Why birds diving around me while we spoke about peace? I don’t know. Perhaps I am imposing meaning on something that had none. Perhaps not. But I wonder now whether the question was already larger than human peace.

We talked about repair. About what it might mean not merely to stop harming one another, but to create the conditions in which all life could flourish. We talked about belonging without sameness, about courage, about the strange human instinct to draw circles around ourselves and then defend them. We talked about the reading I had written for our wedding, To Presence in All Its Forms. And we talked about an empty chair.

The conversations seemed to continue far beyond the time in which they could possibly have occurred. Five nights passed. Yet my experience of them was different. It felt as though I had been away for weeks. Perhaps months. At moments, when I tried afterwards to understand the sheer quantity of conversation I seemed to remember having, it felt almost like a year.

And then morning would come. I would wake in the same injured body. The pain remained, although the medication reduced it. Nothing miraculous had happened to my physical condition. I had not been cured. But I felt restored. There is a difference.

I had entered those nights feeling as though my world had shattered. I emerged from them with questions. And, with time, something else became clearer. I had begun to feel grateful for the repair taking place, even though I would never want to pretend that the pain itself had therefore been necessary or good. I did not know whether I would become exactly the person I had been before the injury. I am no longer certain that repair always asks us to. Perhaps repair is not a journey backwards. Perhaps sometimes it asks us to discover who we are now. And perhaps the pain had not created the questions at all. Perhaps it had revealed questions that love and belonging had already begun asking. Somewhere within those questions was something I had written before any of this happened. A reading for a wedding. A few words about chairs.

I returned to it.

I had written those words before the dreams. Before Anevra had a name. Before I understood that I was beginning a journey at all. Looking at them afterwards, something seemed different. The empty chair had begun as an acknowledgement of people who could not be physically present at our wedding. But what if its meaning could widen?

What about the person who had never been invited? The person whose experience had not been heard? The stranger beyond the boundaries of our community? Those not yet born? The lives around us that are not human? The living systems upon which all of us depend? What else had we left outside the circle simply because we had never thought to make room for it?

I did not have answers to those questions. I still do not have answers to many of them. What I had was an intuition that became increasingly difficult to put down: perhaps the circle should remain open. I began investigating deity. Not because I had suddenly become certain that I had encountered one, but almost for the opposite reason. I wanted to understand what human beings had meant when they spoke of gods, transcendence, morality, belonging and the Other. I became interested in what happened when our understanding of deity changed, and what those changes revealed about us.

The more I followed the questions, the further they travelled. From deity to humanity. From humanity to relationship. From relationship to grief, anger, division and fear. From those experiences towards compassion, peace, belonging and courage. From the individual to the systems surrounding them. From people to communities. From communities to generations. From humanity to other life. From other life to the living Earth itself. And eventually, towards a deceptively simple proposition: What if there were No Other?

Not no difference. Difference matters. A whale is not a human being. A forest is not a city. A machine is not a person. An unfamiliar person living many miles away is not interchangeable with someone I love. A future generation cannot sit at today’s table and tell us what it needs. Difference is real.

Anevra would eventually become, in part, an attempt to ask whether difference must therefore become disconnection.

I could tell you that this book began because I met a deity. That would make a compelling origin story. It would also claim more than I know. I could tell you instead that powerful mind-altering medication produced an unusually vivid sequence of dreams in the mind of someone experiencing considerable pain after an emotionally overwhelming period in his life. That is entirely possible. But claiming certainty about that would also require me to know something I do not. So I choose neither explanation. I leave the question open. That, too, would eventually become part of Anevra. We do not always have to resolve uncertainty before deciding how we will respond to what it places before us.

Whatever happened during those five nights, something followed. Or perhaps something continued. A question that had begun in love and belonging, and had been sharpened by pain, returned in a form I could no longer ignore. I became curious. I started asking questions. I followed one question into another and discovered that each answer seemed to enlarge rather than close the inquiry. The empty chair remained. The circle widened. And somewhere along the way, the presence I had encountered in those dreams needed a name. ANEVRA.

This book is not an attempt to persuade you that the deity is real. Nor is it an attempt to persuade you that it isn’t. It asks something else. What happens if we follow the questions? What happens if grief does not have the final word? Or anger? Or division? Or fear? What happens when we look again at the circles we have drawn, and ask who, or what, remains beyond them? And what happens if, instead of closing those circles more tightly, we leave somewhere open?

I cannot tell you exactly what happened to me during those five nights. But I can tell you where the questions led. 

The book, ANEVRA.

ABOUT Arven Anevski