birth date
Ode to Simone Weil
I sit with you to feel your
wisdom strike notes in my body;
an alignment with the subtle rhythms
of the universe. Each space on the
page is a pause for your breath.
Listen, the lines entreat; beauty is
right beneath your feet. God is
with you. Look upward to witness
your imagination illuminate the sky.
— Seraphina Dawn
Today is Simone Weil's birth date.
Simone is one of my mentors, someone I look to for inspiration, encouragement, and judgment.
One of the reasons I live as I do is because of Simone. When I feel dispaired or disconnected, I reach for her words.
Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sigh that you will recognize it.
Simone Weil was a French philosopher, writer, scholar, teacher, mystic, and political activist. Of Jewish descent, she was fascinated by Catholicism and wrote extensively about Christianity and religion.
She composed essays, letters, and poems on various subjects, drawing from an extensive background in the study of philosophy and science.
She was an avid reader, a universalist, and a socialist. Though she studied Western philosophy and science, her views on the world align with Eastern philosophy in that she expresses the inherent paradox through her work.
We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly.
Topics of interest to Simone included Politics and Social Theory, Ethics and Aesthetics, the Mind and Materialism, Mysticism and God. Unlike many political theorists, Simone LIVED her beliefs and acted in the world.
After graduating from the University of Paris, Simone taught physics at a girl's school. Notable philosophers who attended the UoP include Marie Curie, Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Henri Lefebvre.
True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.
Simone worked in a factory for one year to better understand the psychology of labor and capitalism. Then, she went to Spain to rally against Franco during the Spanish Civil War.
She died at 34 during WWII. She had moved to London to work with the French Resistance. In support of France, she refused to eat more than the ration provided to all those living under the duress of war. She was eventually hospitalized due to malnutrition and died of cardiac failure.
You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.
To say that I look up to Simone is an understatement.
She lived with integrity, candor, courage, and compassion. She died in defense of her beliefs. Her writing is the fuel for a new philosophy, a third way where mysticism and science merge through the discovery of God's consciousness.
God created through love and for love. God did not create anything except love itself, and the means to love. He created love in all its forms. He created beings capable of love from all possible distances.
I have celebrated Simone Weil's birth date for three years. I honor her with poems, flowers, and prayers.
It is a grey day on the horizon, and I have a small collection of Simone’s lectures to read while I drink my morning tea.
Sending you a blessing,
Seraphina
Stars are on fire, peopling the night of distant skies, unspeaking stars, turning blindly, always frozen: you tear away our yesterdays out of our heart, you propel us to tomorrow without our leave, and so we weep, but cries to you are of no use. Since we must, we follow you, with our arms in chains, turning our eyes towards your pure but bitter light. Under your aspect, how little all suffering means. We are silent and we stagger upon our ways. Then in the heart so suddenly, their divine fires.
Written by Simone Weil
Translated by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza and Philip Wilson
Listen and Learn
≌ Learn about the philosophy lived by Simone Weil on one of my favorite podcasts, Philosophize This, by Steven West.
1 question to brew on:
What does God mean to you?