“The Magic of Oscillating”
There are moments in life—rare, wordless, woven between the speaking hours—where one does not move forward or backward, does not progress or regress, but rather hums quietly in place, suspended between the inhale and the exhale, between memory and presence, between what was once believed and what is now becoming, and it is in such a moment that I often return, not in thought exactly, but in scent and shadow and the strange bodily knowing that does not require linear remembering: but there is always the creek before my childhood home that still runs beneath my skin, not as a nostalgia but as a current I never entirely left.
I remember the water not for the trout I never caught but for the way the light shimmered over its stones in late afternoon, how the silence there was a kind of music, how my hands, submerged and tingling, seemed to dissolve into the flow, and how I, a child without name or story, became part of something wider and more intimate than even the word “world” can hold; and though I was the last child to be called inside, and though my family was gentle and safe, I recall how, the moment I crossed the threshold into the warmth of the house, something in me tightened—not from fear, but from the sudden resumption of structure, of walls, of conversations with beginnings and ends, of the solid grammar of indoor life—and outside, I had been formless, or maybe more truly formed.
There was something about those long afternoons, the way the elderberries in the garden ripened without permission, the way the wind through the tall pines carried messages that were not meant to be translated, only felt across the shoulders or just behind the eyes, that taught me something I could not name until much later: that meaning was not contained in moments, but diffused through them, not constructed, but allowed, and that my body, long before my mind caught up, knew how to live in a state of oscillation—between observation and absorption, between the wild and the known, between the seen and the half-felt.
Years passed, and like all children, I became something else, someone older, more spoken into by the world, and then, unexpectedly and profoundly, I became a parent, and everything that had been abstract or theoretical or poetic in me collapsed into a living urgency, a breathing center of gravity that demanded not only presence but protection, and yet—paradoxically—offered a kind of release into the very pattern I had sensed in the creek: the oscillation between giving and receiving, between structuring the day and surrendering to the mystery of what children are when no one is watching them, and I began to live with an uncanny doubleness, as if I were both standing over my child and kneeling beside my own childhood self, both witnessing and being witnessed, both remembering and being remembered.
Jean Gebser, whose notion of the aperspectival describes the collapsing of the fixed point of view, the simultaneity of past and future in a present that does not tick forward but opens like a window in the chest, the way Cézanne, in breaking with the vanishing point, began to paint not what he saw but the space between the seeing and the seen.
I remember one afternoon—clouds low, the studio lit with diffuse golden grey—my partner said, almost to himself, “This clay remembers my hands before I touch it,” and I felt a shiver, because I understood exactly: this was not metaphor, but awareness folding in on itself, oscillating between the act and the echo of the act, between the creation and the ancient remembering of form.
This is the magic, if one can call it that—not an escape from the world but a seeing of it from within its own shimmering skin, a way of being not in the timeline but in the tidal rhythm of presence, where one does not need to resolve anything because everything is already held in tension, in relationship, in resonance; and perhaps this is why meditation, once a practice I approached with discipline and devotion, now feels more like a trailing edge of attention, a faint magnetic pulse at the back of the moment, because the sacred no longer visits in silence but saturates the ordinary—synchronicities that arrive in daylight, dreams that spill into conversation, memories that are not mine alone but seem to belong to the space between me and those I love.
And so we find ourselves, some of us, in what is called post-postmodernity, or metamodernism, not because it is new, but because it remembers what we have forgotten: that irony can coexist with sincerity, that grief and gratitude are not opposites but reflections, that the oscillation between clarity and confusion is not failure but fidelity to the living mystery of being conscious in a world that is itself dreaming.
Gebser called this a mutation—not a progression, not a betterment, but a shift in how reality is present to itself—and in this, he offered not a theory, but a topology of experience, a way to name what happens when you look into the eyes of your child and see both your mother and your own unborn self, or when you watch your partner shape something with his hands that you swear you've seen in a dream, or when you sit beneath a tree and the wind lifts and you suddenly, without reason, know that you are both the listener and the one who is being spoken into.
In such moments, it becomes impossible to say if you are dreaming or awake, if the sculpture is forming you or you it, if time is passing or circling or opening—and that impossibility, rather than being disorienting, becomes a kind of homecoming, a return not to what was, but to what has always been just behind the veil of interpretation.
To oscillate, then, is not to vacillate. It is not indecision. It is not flickering like a failing light. It is the pulse of presence itself, the way breath moves through the body, the way waves move through the ocean, the way language fails just enough to let the real slip through; and perhaps all art, all parenting, all love worth its name, lives in this oscillation—between holding and letting go, between saying and being silent, between forming and dissolving.
I have no conclusion to offer, only this:
The child is still at the creek.
The trout may or may not appear.
The water still runs cold and clear over the stones.
The wind still shifts through the trees outside the window where I sleep.
The clay still remembers.
And I—who am now many selves—still lean into that current,
listening for what the world is whispering through me,
again and again and always now. - Cordula Frei
I write this not only as a writer and editor, not only as the co-founder of Achronon Magazin and former head of media for the Integral Academy in Germany, but as someone who has spent years in devotion to what is not said, but felt—what is not explained, but remembered.
Gebser’s work has never, for me, been a matter of theory. It has always pulsed from the body as memory. I know that what we call “integral” is not a stage we think into—it is a womb we fall back into, a transparency that burns the ego, a mutation that ruptures safety and gives us back our wholeness.
To be Integral is not to preach unity. It is to suffer the fragmentation until it reveals its hidden song. It is to include memory—of the archaic, the mystical, the magical—without shame. It is to know that our futures are made only of what we dare to feel from our deepest pasts.
Today, in that field with my friend, as grass swayed and butterflies hummed with gold, we touched the still point beneath language. And it is from there that I write now, inviting you not to “understand” this work—but to let it pierce you. Let it remind your skin. Let it speak through your venes.
The trance of modern life is not merely unhealthy—it is a murder of memory. And this essay, these voices, this moment, is our small act of resurrection.
Let it burn. Let it sing.
Let the invisible web awaken in you.
-Thankyou, for listening
About the author: CORDULA FREI
is a distinguished author, editor, and curator with a profound dedication to integrative practices, deep ecology, and transformative narratives. As head of media for Integral Perspectives magazine, she has been instrumental in shaping content that explores holistic viewpoints. She co-created Achronon magazine, a platform challenging conventional timelines and narratives, and served as editor for Info 3 magazine, bridging spirituality, culture, and contemporary issues. At Germany’s first regenerative society, Hofgut Leo in Gresgen, she curated cultural initiatives and oversees organizational aspects, promoting sustainable and regenerative practices.
Her longstanding collaboration with Tom Amarque is rooted in a vibrant friendship and a shared passion for critical thinking, questioning societal mainstreams, and shaping transformative narratives. As the author of Soulskin, she explores the initiation journey of the feminine psyche as a deep psychological pilgrimage into personal transformation and with her collegue Andrew Sweeny, after meeting up in a cave in Paris reading Rilke at a poets slam, she is heartfully anticipating their joint venture of the Storytellers Writing Classes coming up for Parallax Academia.
Her life is deeply connected to deep ecology, living among horses and dogs, traveling through vast wilderness to engage in regenerative dialogue with nature. Through her work, Cordula Frei holds the Podcast Serie: “Roots of Enlivenment“ at Parallax Media with a invitation to inspire and lead in the realms of integrative thought, ecological awareness, and cultural transformation.
Write her at cordula@parallax-media.eu
If you feel called to walk this path beside me, meet me in my Parallax classes or support through a paid Substack membership — a gesture of reciprocity and devotion that helps keep this soul work alive.
My god.....how do you DO this?.......
BOOM goes my brain