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I wrap my arms around the trunk of her
and still she stands, scrag arms spoking high,
last of the needled green gone now
from her crest. Straight still, strong still
rooted to the sweet and cankerous ground
you are dying, I say.
Then I press against my beard her coarse skin,
squeezing out her death,
dredging up the love in me, resurrecting
us from the cold underbelly of thought.
And to hold myself a moment buoyant
thank you for your death, I say,
though your heartwood is too soft to raft. Yes
I say, and let us stand apart,
because we are our learning to unmoor.
unmoor
wait-- where did you come from now?
it must be my mind's associations
again-- i can no longer speak
poetry without
smelling you. perhaps it is because
i cannot yet describe your scent...
it is still
mysterious
and distant
i need to spend more time
with you and your lips
then i will have a hold on this scent
and something to let go of
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Noah, i think you have spent
Noah, i think you have spent more time outdoors than i; or at least you have spent your time outdoors differently. i love the word 'still' in this poem so very much, though perhaps i love it most of all because what it creates in and for me is not so much stillness, but rather silence. because there is so much movement, change and growth, and feelings responding to-- yet again you remind me that she is still-- still. i hear only my voice when i read this poem, and then the surrounding sounds return. you are very careful with your sibilance and your hard 'c' sounds. and then the r's come in real strong, at the end especially-- which is funny because it actually moors me in the poem, it is like i am floating for the first stanza, and as the s's and c's give way to the d's and t's, then eventually the r's, i find myself becoming more and more firmly planted in the ground of the poem, and it is as though i have been brought into this space of unmooring so that i can unmoor with you.
'resurrecting' feels like a light-switch in this sense, then, because it brings all of these sounds together as the shift is taking its sharpest-- which is never too sharp, because it all stays together very nicely.
and you point to learning as a process of becoming. instead of acquiring knowledge and then becoming a knower, you say, as rajneesh would, "i am not a knower, i am not someone who is learning, rather i AM my learning, i become with the process of knowing." i am not someone who possesses something learned, rather i am the very process itself.
you are fighting the subject-object split, too, in your solemn way. you press against your beard her coarse skin-- you don't press up against the object, because you are becoming with her, you are both one in this moment, one subject becoming; then as you stand apart, two subjects. no subject-object. you are separate, then you recognize your oneness, and you render this, for me the reader, into the distinction of "my beard" and "her skin" -- this is for the sake of the poem. really this act is the one moving, the one becoming. but language is not like that, so you add the structure of language to it and you share with us in a way that allows you to share, and you show the two recognizing they are one, and becoming with each other, and then standing apart and coming out as two subjects-- separate, yet still one. it is a beautiful learning, a beautiful becoming.
...her death...
...the love in me, resurrecting
us...
this is the movement. very beautiful, Noah. this poem was worth the waiting.
The tug of cycles
That scraggly conifer that you have embraced with your heart, the poison that was Socrates' end, the seasonal dying of these expressive trees, and the more mysterious union that "we are our learning to unmoor" are layered resonances of loving and dying throughout all of this beauty. I can see that hemlock pushed along through that relentless cycle of seasons.
The clouds have broken again for you.
I NOAH TREE OF A MAN OF A WE AND IT IS THE MOST DELICIOUS SOUND
Your choice to “wrap my arms around the trunk of her” instead of “around her trunk” is not insignificant. The trunk in your poem IS her existence as opposed to belonging to her. And she is still standing, not with scraggily arms, but with “scrag arms,” underscoring your own idiomatic description of experience. She (and this hemlock is gendered) is dying but still standing strong. Like a cancer victim, she is dying from the inside out. Her strength is coming from her roots, from her structure (we might even say, character).
And you imagine yourself “squeezing out her death” as if she were Silverstein’s `The Giving Tree.’ She is here to nourish you but without any expectations of you giving back to her. You are aware of this giving and an empathic impulse is emerging in you; she is “dredging up the love in me…”. But, the poem extends outward perhaps to all of humanity, for she is not only “resurrecting” you; it is all of us she potentially resurrects “from the cold underbelly of thought.” I sense here that our insouciance to the fragile and delicate balance of life dissolves in a deepening death awareness.
This Emersonian transcendental theme speaks to a `nature mysticism,’ which emerges as an initial apprehension of the Pure Witness (what Emerson called the “Over-Soul”—please read his essay `On Nature’). This 'nature mysticism' is not only a felt connectedness with nature but with the whole World, including mankind and its culture, and is what Wilber calls an `Eco-Noetic Self.’
I also began cultivating these higher levels of consciousness through Nature, and the tree I wrote about to describe this “death awareness” you speak of was a beech tree, my favorite, and I said,
the tree, a stump,
from years of weather, twisted then fell,
no one even noticing its lime leaves
and cadent swell against the sun in May,
its branches, smooth and sloped, and grayish trunk,
too large to see the house in shade,
not the children who raced fast past its girth,
not the pulsing teens, nor throngs of lovers
who met beneath its hands in dark of night;
no, not until death did its existence
begin, taking on a life that until
that moment lived apart from other things;
The most brilliant and pure expression of this awakening to consciousness through Nature and, in particular, death is, for me, found in Walt Whitman’s `Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.’ There is not a reading of this poem where I do not weep and when I am not transported beyond.
“Resurrecting/us from the cold underbelly of thought.”
Let us not lose sight here of the role language plays in this resurrection. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This is an evolutionary and not theistic declaration for me and draws language out of its inchoate “underbelly” of preconsciousness to its status of heightened recognition of spirituality. As Noah I think almost infers in the poem, we have a responsibility as conscious beings to tend to the delicate balance of life, of which nature being an integral part.
And to hold myself a moment buoyant,
thank you for your death, I say,
though your heartwood is too soft to raft. Yes
I say, and let us stand apart,
because we are our learning to unmoor.
This is really exquisite, Noah. “To hold myself a moment buoyant” is meditation, the floating in silence with thought suspended or, more accurately, dissolved in order to truly grasp the beauty, the depth of awareness; and awareness that identifies death (along with sexual intimacy, a smaller death-- le petit mort!) as the greatest source of spiritual wisdom. It is the “heartwood” of embodiment and, despite it being “too soft to raft,” that is, to use in some practical way, it is a rafting of a higher transcendent awareness superordinate to but including the aesthetically delightful world of nature which nourishes us, literally and spiritually. This last couplet is particularly interesting because it shifts back to the psychological necessity of being separate from the mother (remember, the hemlock is gendered) as a way of strengthening the self that “stands apart.” However, it’s a transitional stage of consciousness or development because it leads to the greater wisdom of emptiness, the understanding that we are inter-being, that is, we are all interconnected. And so, the double meaning of “unmoor:” In “our learning,” we at first separate from our parents and then, at a later point, reunite again when we “unmoor” ourselves from our selves. This is a greater mooring, for sure and one I’m sure Emily for one will be happy to know :)
a puzzle
I understand that Noah's poem is written in a language that differs from conversational usage. Parts of it are mysterious. They are images that leave me searching for resolution.
“thank you for your death, I say, though your heartwood is too soft to raft. Yes I say, and let us stand apart, because we are our learning to unmoor.”
Om’s literate analysis beautifully pulls apart some of these mysteries, and I respect the rigor of those insights. But, as an innocent reader, I wish that there were a way of getting to the heart of this language without rolling in the big guns of academic and historical criticism.
When I read such analysis, it lets me off the hook of the internal struggle that begins when I read the poem. I want to stay on that hook as long as possible. This struggle for meaning is the creative process working in me (stimulated by Noah). Once the pieces of the puzzle come together, I am done. I move onto whatever is next. The longer that I can postpone that moment, the longer the rich creative process stimulated in me by the poem continues. I want that.
I also want to be a part of this conversation. Since I am arguing, I guess, for a kind of silence, I wonder how that will work.
A PUZZLE NEED NOT BE A MUZZLE
“I understand how beautifully Om's literate analysis pulls apart some of these mysteries, and I respect the rigor of those insights. But, as an innocent reader, I wish that there were a way of getting to the heart of this language without rolling in the big guns of academic and historical criticism.”
This is an excellent point, Arnold and, as an “innocent” reader, too, I completely agree. I enter into a poem in a similar way, as I did with Noah’s and James’, Emily’s and, indeed, my own. As I shared, Whitman’s `Out of the Cradle…’ sends me to love through its mourning, and mine. For me, the pieces of the puzzle never actually come together, and so I am never done-- emotionally, intellectually, or spiritually, irrespective of how much “analysis” I engage in. I don’t think Noah’s poem will be sullied by my interpretive meanderings, nor I hope they won’t eclipse anyone else’s experience of the poem. But, perhaps it would a bit naïve to think I might not affect another reader’s experience. I hope I do. And I am confident that I will not “postpone” the moments of their intimacy with the poem and, in fact, my hope is that it will actually deepen their experience by exploring different perspectives that the poem, by its very nature (and by Noah sharing it with us), lends itself to.
But to your specific point, which is the most important: “getting to the heart of this language.” I think you have created a false dilemma by creating an either/or scenario. Interpretation, in and of itself, does not prevent one from getting to the heart of the poem; the reader herself either gets in the way or doesn’t. It certainly didn’t get in my way, I really feel like I get this poem, in its essence, and have sat with it a while and perhaps will return to it again. A poem, as an aesthetic form of prayer (as I believe it is), if it is a good poem, holds its own and cannot be overtaken or mutilated by interpretation. The interpretive analysis, I would think, is actually another separate literary expression only linguistically related to the poem through association and seeking understanding (like you and I are through the blog). Again, understanding occurs on different epistemological levels.
Now, you don’t have to like or even agree with the form, style or content of the expression. It doesn’t even have to be read! Noah’s poem doesn’t even have to be read if someone doesn’t like poetry (and many don’t or just can’t relate to it).
And so, I’m not sure I adequately addressed your question, so please guide me if I’m missing something. My gut tells me that you’re concerned my interpretation potentially eclipses the direct experience of engaging with Noah’s poem.
POSITIONS AND DISPOSITIONS
In reading Arnold’s thoughtful and sincere post, I was reminded of Carmen’s post of last week (Spot is behind the bookshelf) which, Carmen, I apologize for not responding. She said, “Sometimes I think too hard. I get crowded out of my own head, and feel the press of the crowd around me. And sometimes this blog feels the same way. I am crowded out of the niche we have created here, not because, precisely, of any of you, but rather because sometimes I become lost in the reading and forget the people. I came back after a final and there had been 40 new posts, some pages long, and I read for hours, losing myself in the flow of text.”
Though slightly different than Arnold’s point, Carmen did allude to the ongoing debate we’ve had regarding what she describes as “intimacy versus intellectualism,’ and I do think this is Arnold’s point, a point, by the way, which I used to experience as both frustrating at times (transferentially-speaking :), and yet which I very much understand. And so, if I may, I’d like to bring the Dali Lama into the discussion, not because I agree with everything he says (and, as I shared, I am not a Buddhist), but because of this one thing he shares so simply and eloquently in his interfaith encounter with Christians at the 1994 John Main Seminar (transcribed in the outstanding book, `The Good Heart’). I’ll quote:
“To achieve a meaningful dialogue, a dialogue which would mutually enrich both traditions, I feel we need a foundation that is based on the clear recognition of the diversity that exists among humanity; the diverse mental dispositions, interests, and spiritual inclinations of the people of the world. For example, some people, the Christian traditions, a belief in a Creator has the most powerful effects on their ethical life and serves to motivate them to act in an ethical and sound way…. For others, the Buddhist tradition, which does not emphasize belief in a Creator, may be more effective. In the Buddhist tradition, there is emphasis on a sense of a personal responsibility rather than on a transcendent being.
It is also crucial to recognize that both spiritual traditions share the common goal of producing a human being who is fully realized, spiritually mature, good and a warm-hearted person. Once we have recognized these two points… then I think there is a very strong foundation for dialogue. It is with these convictions, these two principal premises that I always enter into a dialogue with other traditions.”
A beautiful quote, no? Since truth itself has only relative dimensions, we can only speak of aspects of truth, or the multidimensionality of truth. What makes something true is only in relation to what is false, in relation to another perception. When we share our points of view, what always needs consideration is a frame of reference, a context.
As far as I can see in our blog community, we all seem to be more sensitive to each other’s dispositions and interests and are more thoughtful in how we think about what we are thinking, and about what and how we are expressing what we’re thinking, with the other(s) in mind. I felt that very strongly in Carmen and Arnold’s last posts, both of who tend to emphasize different aspects of experience than I do at particular times. And I hope I am sensitive to their needs, as well, and of course would like to hear if I’m missing something.
My formula is simple: “You can be right or you can be intimate.” Honestly, I think that’s why this blog has been so successful, I don’t feel a competitiveness or an absolute need to be right, which feels ugly and counter-relational.
Disagreements are exquisite in this light and fist-raising can create some great debate! My hope here is that everyone feels recognized and heard; it’s something we have all shared we’ve struggled with throughout our lives. And we all deserve it!
I feel
way more comfortable with analysis and theory than I first did - wouldn't dream of throwing the baby out with the bath water. Over this short span of time, hanging with all of you, I have come to understand the role of theory in understanding experience. I was just so used to coming at experience strictly by intuition and failing to see that - as sharp as my intuitive skills are - they can't always tell the whole story or any story at all. It is all a matter of balance. I suppose that I confused theory with doctrine. But more on that at another time.
I did want to go back to a subject that I have been pondering and that has been addressed in earlier posts. Suffering. The other night I was thinking about life/suffering and suffering in a productive way - it crossed my mind that I grew up with a romantic idea of suffering ( although as I was suffering I did not think it romantic at all). Why is it that there is so much romanticism about suffering and that in order to create something of value, you must suffer?
IT’S MY PARTY AND I’LL SIMPLY SUFFER IF I WANT TO
“Why is it that there is so much romanticism about suffering and that in order to create something of value, you must suffer?”
Emily, this is an awesome question! And what comes to mind first is, What is “romanticism?” When I think of romanticism, I think of idealization, and so the idea of “ideal self” comes to mind. And we cannot speak of ideal self without first understanding that no thought nor action occurs without motivation, without need. Motivation is what floats our psychic boats-- the need for self-preservation, self-regulation, attachment, pleasure, mastery, for example. And so, for the romantic, motivational strivings will be filtered (perceived, interpreted)through this ideal sense of self.
We also have to understand that we are developmental beings, beings constituted in an evolutionary process. And so, what occurs in childhood, at those critical junctures of development and within the relational patternings of parent/child interactions, stays with us throughout life, indeed, forms and informs our very reality. This is part of our fatedness, and is a real bitch to change, and not without great effort.
So, what does the ideal self want? What motivates it? The ideal self seeks the perfect love, the love unconditional and fully present to meet one’s needs, the most important of which, in the context of ideal love, is recognition. Love me, adore me, tell me I am your everything and that you will never leave me. Lift me up into the sky of your dreams and tell me I’m the one. And be available and present, mirror me and be my twin. Can’t get more ideal than that, can you?
Suffering. Now it gets more complicated. “Why is it that there is so much romanticism about suffering and that in order to create something of value, you must suffer?”
Children are, by nature, egocentric. They must be, it allows them to master the world and absorb everything it has to offer them on their fa so la te developmental way towards independence. It’s a cognitive thing, a self-preservation thing, egocentricity. Egocentricity doesn’t mean that the world revolves around me, but more like, “I am one with the world.” The focus is on me, totally and completely. In the ideal world, that is! The best we could be as parents is good-enough, and that is good enough. But, sometimes, and perhaps often-- certainly too often-- something goes awry and parents are sadly not even good-enough, and a rupture is created in one’s development, particularly emotional development. The self-regulating thought/feeling system goes coo-coo, and we get a little (or a lot) coo coo. And because we’re egocentric, we believe that we are the reason our needs were not met. But, clever and resilient as we are, we have all these psychological mechanisms that compensate for all our coo-coo-ness, one of which is idealization! We become romantics and really go coo-coo. We even have a culture that feeds the romantic coo-coo machine, and even religions that feed the romantic coo-coo ideals. Pay a small fee-- that is, your soul—and I will feed your fantasies with romantic idealisms.
Of course, I’m describing a (very) simple, Reader’s Digest version, but I think it gets the point across: that idealization, in its cultural form of romanticism, mimics a deeper need for attachment and recognition. Suffering, IN ITS DEGENERATED FORM (that is, seen as a cause instead of an effect), is the egocentric belief that, if I’m a good boy or girl, and I show how much pain I’m in, mommy (in her myriad cultural symbolic forms) will love me, take care of me, and never leave me. If I accept that I’m a sinner, God will love me. The more I suffer, the more I will prove that I am a sinner and worthy of God’s forgiveness. There are of course other dynamics playing out here, particularly around the guilt of being separate (loyalty), shame around having one’s own voice, and the sense of badness and self-punitive acts which accompany them. And just the sheer manipulation of suffering and the perceived secondary gains are remarkable. But, this is the gist of the belief that suffering itself is a motivation (cause) and therefore, something of value.
That’s my hot potato, here, catch :)
I'll take your hot potato
I'll take your hot potato and make potato chips!!!!
suffering tries
this is a really cool post, though i think you haven't quite addressed the second part of Emily's question-- or, at least, i don't quite feel satisfied :)
i love what you do with the second part, though-- taking the terms and using them to further explore your response to the first part of the question. the first part being “Why is it that there is so much romanticism about suffering," and the second being, "and that in order to create something of value, you must suffer?”
you also take a few tours around the first part-- what does 'romanticism' mean? how does it apply to suffering? where does the romanticism come from? where does the suffering come from? and so on. very cool.
but, if i am understanding Emily correctly (and if not-- then i'm posing a new question inspired by yours, Emily!) the second half is to say, "why is suffering necessary for creativity (of things of value)?"
now-- this leaves me with two important questions that i don't think are quite addressed in the question as i thus far see it: (1) what are "things of value"? and (2) issuffering necessary for creating things of value? the asking assumes that it is, but i think this would deserve some investigation, too.
though i am going to skip a step and take a different kind of stance. we've done a bit of shared investigation about suffering on here, and we've come across the notion thatsuffering is, or something like that... is there a quick-fix to suffering? if understanding is the remedy of all suffering, is there a one-two-three to understanding? i'm not sure-- i'm just getting started understanding, but it seems that at least for me there is a lot of work that goes into understanding, because if i am not very careful, i forget again and go back into my old patterns and suffer in a way that feels meaningless and unfair and yadda yadda yadda (or blah blah blah, if you will!).
so if suffering is going to be experienced, let's say because it is an effect of our fundamental lack of understanding (or i'll say 'ignorance'), then the creation of things of value seems to be necessarily informed by suffering. i am the creator-- if an aspect of my experience is suffering, then it seems suffering will go into my creating-- especially things that feel of great value to me, because it takes my entirety to create them. is this going somewhere? this is an interesting line of investigation for me, so i'm just sort of working through thoughts here-- any responses would be lovely :)
a few words on suffering
As you say James, suffering is and as Om has indicated, suffering is not itself a cause. I think suffering (and I guess I mean psychological suffering), like feelings in general, is not in and of itself but instead points. I suppose my greatest change in attitude toward suffering in the past few years is that I have come to see it as a teacher, a guide, a sign post, similar to how I now consider my feelings. I think we would all agree that suffering is of the "human condition." So turning toward suffering, embracing it and penetrating it is a creative act, and is a key aspect of creative exploration. I think we can easily misconstrue this, or misunderstand/represent it and wind up romanticizing suffering in and of itself. That takes me no where, it only reifies suffering, obscuring vision and insight. But I think a good creative work must embrace suffering in order to look into it, and beyond it. I think in order to peel back the layers of reality, to challenge and deepen awareness, there must be a turning toward suffering and a willingness to experience it and learn from it. I find that I connect with people most deeply when we are able to hold out our suffering to each other and say 'this is what I have suffered, and this is what I seek to know and understand. this is my source of pain, but also my guide. I am not my suffering, but I suffer and I want to suffer with as much awareness and compassion as I can so that this suffering might guide us to understanding, love, joy.'
When I encounter art which finds love inside of suffering, i feel known.
SUFFERING TIES, SUSPENDERS AND OTHER ACCOUTERMENTS
“this is a really cool post, though i think you haven't quite addressed the second part of Emily's question-- or, at least, i don't quite feel satisfied :)”
“But, this is the gist of the belief that suffering itself is a motivation (cause) and therefore, something of value… but, if i am understanding Emily correctly (and if not-- then i'm posing a new question inspired by yours, Emily!) the second half is to say, "why is suffering necessary for creativity (of things of value)?"
I’m going to totally digress here for a moment, but for good reason. Please bear with me. James, I’m not exactly sure if Emily equates value with creativity. She says, “Why is it that there is so much romanticism about suffering and that in order to create something of value, you must suffer?,” which doesn’t intrinsically seem to suggest creativity itself as the signifier. What is it, Emily??? It felt to me that “value” was the instrumental term here, not creativity. Should we assume that anything created is of value and therefore reflects creativity? Like a nuclear bomb, for example? Like death camps and pogroms? Value, (Latin valēre to be of worth) refers to something of importance or worth and, though creativity is of the highest value, what is “valuable” is not necessarily creative. However, I realize in this context, I am defining value as having inherent goodness. In my definition, value does not inherently signify creativity (creativity= the quality of being creative or the ability to create). I might be splitting hairs, but precision is the point. Again, it’s not a question of right or wrong, but intention, in this case, Emily’s intention. This is why I need terms defined before I explore them (which is what I get from your post, too, James). Either way, your path of inquiry is equally important, and I like it very much. “(1) what are "things of value"? and (2) is suffering necessary for creating things of value? the asking assumes that it is, but i think this would deserve some investigation, too.”
At the very end of my post, I said, “But, this is the gist of the belief that suffering itself is a motivation (cause) and therefore, something of value.” I equated value with motivation, as in suffering required to cause “something of value” to the person who is suffering, which would include a poem, for example. In other words, “Why do we have to suffer to get (or create) what we want and need?” I obviously took a specific (psychological) path here, but there are other paths of inquiry we could take too, like an ontological path, which would distinguish suffering as a cause and as an effect. I said in another post, “Loss is a condition of life,” meaning that suffering is not a cause but an effect of living. This view makes Emily’s question moot because we don’t have to suffer in order to get or create health, relationship or things of value; suffering IS, as a fact of living, change and impermanence.
Now, to your take on Emily’s question (which might be the correct interpretation): "why is suffering necessary for creativity (of things of value)?" This is quite exciting to me, because it is a very deep question and speaks to consciousness as an evolutionary process (where mind is viewed as a stage of consciousness).
Whether we express it as Victor Hugo’s “Necessity is the mother of invention,” DaVinci’s "Necessity is the mistress and guardian of nature," or William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, "Nature must obey necessity," there is a common Darwinian thread in all these thinkers pointing to a “survival of the fittest;” that is, suffering or adversity motivate the need for self protection and self-generation, both of which force us to confront nature, or the effects of conditions and causes in nature, and thus find solutions to perpetuate existence. We might say that creativity as artistic achievement fulfills this need, too, because it stimulates mind to find solutions to unanswerable questions regarding the nature and truth of reality.
Now, Noah’s response is a real beauty, too, because he addresses suffering in its most creative form: as teaching. And teaching is a deep evolutionary principle because it guides one through the life process, in such a way, as to seek solutions to unanswerable problems. This, of course, is a paradox, because what is unanswerable today might very well be answered tomorrow, if we have the courage and wisdom to seek the teaching.
“ I suppose my greatest change in attitude toward suffering in the past few years is that I have come to see it as a teacher, a guide, a sign post…. So turning toward suffering, embracing it and penetrating it is a creative act, and is a key aspect of creative exploration…. But I think a good creative work must embrace suffering in order to look into it, and beyond it. I think in order to peel back the layers of reality, to challenge and deepen awareness, there must be a turning toward suffering and a willingness to experience it and learn from it.”
And lastly, at the same time, Noah also addresses a path which serves as a partial solution (as vehicle) to alleviating suffering: relationship. Relationship with others. Relationship with self, relationship with art:
“I find that I connect with people most deeply when we are able to hold out our suffering to each other and say 'this is what I have suffered, and this is what I seek to know and understand. this is my source of pain, but also my guide. I am not my suffering, but I suffer and I want to suffer with as much awareness and compassion as I can so that this suffering might guide us to understanding, love, joy.' When I encounter art which finds love inside of suffering, i feel known.”
Suffering and romanticim
Om, I think I understand what you are saying about romanticism and how it relates to our development and sense of self and our need for survival and how it begins with idealization. My take on suffering is that when there is a “rupture in development” and the child is not getting what he or she needs to grow in a healthy way the child begins to feel that he is the cause ( he is bad or he is a sinner) of his parent’s rejection, neglect, etc. And one great way of coping with this is idealization.
I relate this to my life in this way: to compensate for my low self esteem ( lack of the kind of support necessary to feel good about myself) and the sense that I was somehow lesser, since I was not the sister who died ( and became idealized), all my fantasies about myself and my future ( and future loves) were romanticized (idealized). The pillow on my bed, where I practiced passionate kissing, was astonishingly handsome. I was, especially in my white nightgown, the undiscovered beauty and a marathon swimmer on a white mattress. I was discovered on a perfect summer day after a swim at the pool. The saving grace of my fantasies was that in my rise to fame and fortune, I remained a kind and generous person who kept giving away her riches. BUT NOT ALL THE RICHES! I kept a house in Hawaii, one in Hollywood, a stable of horses, a kennel of dogs, and a yacht.
When inquiring about romanticizing and suffering in my earlier post I was remembering myself as a young girl romanticizing the death of Sylvia Path, Virginia Woolf and others who destroyed themselves by suicide or by ingesting incredible amounts of drugs and alcohol. I equated their suffering to their works of art and wondered if they could have done what they did without whatever dark veil hung over them.
I certainly have covered thousand of miles since those questions, but then, in my own state of despair, those questions loomed large. It was not so much that I wanted to die from my suffering, but if I wanted to create something of value, my death would be necessary.
SUFFERING ROMANTICISM
Hi Emily, Happy New Year. All these wonderful posts I want to respond to: Anya’s horse, Caterina’s poem, and your lovely post on suffering. I also used to romanticize suffering when I was young and feared I was lose something dear to me if I gave it up; and I did, I lost my connection with my mother, a connection secured by her depression. Of course, at the time I believed it was my creative pulse and the hypo-manic flights of inspiration that would cease if I was happy. My suffering was probably the most potent drug I ever ingested and with the longest lasting effects.
But, I realized it wasn’t the suffering that fueled my creativity, it was my creativity that translated the suffering. I had it backwards, but risked everything to stay connected with an idealized image of a mother that never existed (and image that took many relational forms over time and through stages of development). This is the consequence of a real traumatic rupture.
I think we can even see our attachments to suffering in the subtle forms of our language, such as, “because of my suffering, I have transformed my life.” Or, “my suffering gave me the inspiration to become an artist.” These self-manipulations of thought to secure unreliable beliefs about creativity and reality and loyalty to unhealthy family systems engendering these distorted views, ultimately fail and do not serve a true creativity.
I think cultivating self-awareness is the greatest source of creativity and developing compassion (first and foremost, with oneself) the greatest source of love and joy. We don’t have to suffer to be creative; suffering is already there as a condition of life.
judgment
Here is another version of the idea that I was expressing: When I begin to experience something, there is a hard-to-resist tendency to draw a conclusion about the experience. For example, "I like this." or "I don't like this." It does not matter what judgment that I make, the judgment disconnects me from the act of experience. I can no longer enter it as pure experience. That experience is now in it's labeled pigeon hole, and I must move on.
I know this to be true for me because I have observed it in myself. So my goal is to suspend judgment for as long as possible. Ultimately, it will come, but I can delay it for a while.
THANK YOU, ARNOLD, A FEW MORE THOUGHTS
Hey, Arnold, thanks for your response. I very much appreciate it and, as i said, completely understand what you are sharing regarding this period of direct experience or engagement with an object, or subject, for that matter. In fact, meditation I believe is the purest form of that “suspension,” because it goes even further than merely subjective experience, that “hard-to-resist tendency to draw a conclusion about experience.” The moment of judgment you speak of is indeed a conceptual marker of interference. I actually see it as a point along a continuum of perceptual and conceptual interferences that exist even before judgments.
In a way, you are describing meditation, as in, “meditation on a poem.” It is your direct experience of the poem before it is interpreted and therefore named or categorized (“labeled pigeon hole”). I appreciate this because I also engage a poem (or any work of art) in this way. A poem, however, is different than a photo because of its linguistic context which, as you have painstakingly shared, a photo doesn’t have (a photo is self-contained). We can meditate on both, but the meditation experience would likely be different. Both of these meditations, however, would still be considered limited, as far as meditation goes. Aesthetically and subjectively, it’s all fair play.
If you will indulge me, I would like to write a bit on meditation, because it addresses perception and conception at their barest conditions. When you speak about direct experience (“when I begin to experience something”), you make clear that it involves a series of moments of, we might even say, “intimacy,’ because there is very little in the field to interfere with the emotions that are evoked. The mode of experience is mostly emotional and intuitive. Thinking, in the form of conceptualization, is minimized. That is, until you make a judgment, which takes the form, as you say, of “I like this” or “I don’t like this.” I would be interested in knowing what impels you to go there, but that’s another discussion.
Judgment is part of a conceptualization process that also includes naming and categorizing, an experiential mental image, fact-connecting conceptions, or term-connecting conceptions. All this takes place immediately and unconsciously, even when we think we’re having a pure experience of suspension. It’s merely a matter of degree. The idea of meditation is to minimize those erroneous, deceptive, and distorted perceptions and conceptions even further than what we typically experience in our engagements with art or lovers. I mean, the interpretive mechanism is halted!
The Buddhist philosopher, Nagarjuna, in his various writings, but particularly in his “Seventy Stanzas on Emptiness” (the treatise I’m more familiar with and which I highly recommend to everyone because of its accessibility), went through great efforts to help us understand how mind functions and how faulty thinking causes suffering. His basic premise is that consciousness is always consciousness of something. As the translator, Daniel Ross Komito, tells us, it arises and ceases as a series of moments, and that any phenomenon which arises does so in dependence on certain conditions and causes. Visual consciousness (along with all other perceptions), for example, arises in dependence on three conditions: an eye organ, an object and the actual cause, which is the immediately preceding moment of consciousness.
This is part of a stream of moments of consciousness that stretch across time and therefore has continuity. What’s fascinating about Buddhist thought is that mind is considered a sixth sense organ, but is different in that it is a responsive and reflective organ and apprehends its objects through the influence of subjective dispositions. The objects of mental consciousness (mind) include concepts, memories, emotional states, or perceptions.
With very long and practiced meditation, we will never be aware of the “raw images” created in perceptual consciousness because mental consciousness registers the objects of mental consciousness. It is possible, though and the closer you get to achieving this, the less and less suffering you will experience!
Our “thoughts” are unable to separate mental images from bare perceptions, and thus thoughts are always deemed erroneous and distorted. The objective of meditation is exactly this: to train the mind to understand its own erroneous understanding of perceptual and conceptual cognitions. This understanding absolutely alleviates suffering.
According to Nagarjuna, what creates problems with conceptual cognition is the mixing of mental images with perceptions, along with a fundamental belief in selfhood. The example Komito uses is a rose. “If one cognizes a red rose growing on a vine, one’s cognition of the rose is said to be deceived because one is incapable of separating one’s conception about the rose from the mere appearance of a red shape, which is all that is actually cognized by a visual consciousness.”
“If I neither think “the rose is impermanent” nor perceive the impermanence of the rose, I am deceived about the mode of existence of the rose, which is impermanent.”
By calling it a rose, I am deceived about the mode of appearance. These are considered distorted conceptions. What makes a perfect cognition is that it is fresh and infallible. Not fresh the way we might ordinarily think of it in its subjective form, but even deeper. Fresh means that it is the first moment of cognition of an object in a series of moments which cognize a particular object. Infallibility means that a perfect cognition correctly ascertains its object and eliminates misconceptions about it. We are able to induce certainty about objects based on valid reasoning.
I apologize for going so far into this, but it allows me to put Arnold’s response into a certain context that I would like to convey. I want to make clear that I actually agree with his response regarding the authenticity of relating, whether to a poem, an object of art, and even a living relationship with another being. I envision these experiences as a kind of spiral rather than linear because that would relegate interpretation as less authentic to relating, which it is not; it’s merely a tool or vehicle for deeper understanding so that more authentic relating can actually take place.
Nagarjuna
Om, your post speaks about perception, consciousness, and suffering. You say, "Visual consciousness (along with all other perceptions), for example, arises in dependence on three conditions: an eye organ, an object and the actual cause, which is the immediately preceding moment of consciousness."
I am hoping that I have not misunderstood this, but it appears that visual consciousness is being described as a passive process involving only the eye as sense organ, the object of perception, and the "actual cause" defined as the preceding moment of consciousness. This last thing is a puzzle to me. What are the qualities of the actual cause?
I have always experienced my consciousness as an action. Mind engages with preliminary raw perception with everything it knows or has experienced in order to actively make sense of it in the context of its known universe. Is this the "actual cause?" Does the preceding moment of consciousness contain the mind's whole universe?
NAGARJUNA: RESPONSE TO ARNOLD
Arnold, Happy New year! Thank you for your questions. I deeply appreciate your interest and engagement. This is such sticky and complex stuff, consciousness, but most exciting for trying to understand the nature of mind and its capacity, not only to cause suffering, but more importantly, to free us from suffering. Suffering as a cause for hatred and cruelty is too pervasive and destroys so many beautiful lives. If we can just get under it a little bit and free up some of that pain with understanding, more joy will be realized. And joy is infectious, too!
Let me address your questions. “I am hoping that I have not misunderstood this, but it appears that visual consciousness is being described as a passive process involving only the eye as sense organ, the object of perception, and the "actual cause" defined as the preceding moment of consciousness. This last thing is a puzzle to me."
What are the qualities of the actual cause?”
Nagarjuna (through his translator, Komito) suggests that the first five material sense consciousnesses are passive because they receive impressions of material objects; the sixth, mental consciousness, is responsive and reflective. As you correctly observe, passivity doesn’t make sense regarding mental consciousness; what is considered passive by Nagarjuna is the receiving part of the eye organ when individual consciousness makes contact with an object. However, mental consciousness, as the immediately preceding moment of visual consciousness, for example, is active, responsive, and reflective.
What Nagarjuna calls the “preceding moment of consciousness’ is an immediate condition because consciousness does not occur in a vacuum; it is part of a continuum or continuity of moments of consciousness. In this way, mind is seen as both an “organ” like the eye (which is a dominant condition for visual perception), and an immediate condition of consciousness. And so, mental consciousness requires an organ (mind), an object (a rock) and an immediately preceding moment of consciousness (actual cause).
Visual consciousness is less confusing because it is dependent on an organ (eye—called an “dominant condition”), and object (a rock—called an “object condition”), and the immediate condition of consciousness (actual cause).
The qualities or factors of the actual cause (the immediate preceding moment of consciousness), Nagarjuna tells us, are the subjective secondary mental factors, derived from past memories, emotions and concepts (what are called karmic formations, but I won’t get into that now). What occurs as an active process (which, by the way, is not a cause/ effect dynamic as we typically think of it, in a mechanistic way; it is more a dynamic of prerequisite conditions, which include immediate mechanistic cause/effects dynamics), is that a memory or mental image arises at the same moment as the arising of the mental consciousness.
Notice how I say “arises,” which gives the impression that it’s passive, which consciousness isn’t. This is a very critical point, because I believe Nagarjuna wants to emphasize the interdependent conditionality of existence, not the independent, isolated conventional view Westerners are familiar with. He says, “This arises because that is.” This means that things do exist in some way, but nothing exists on its own. He also emphasizes that nothing can be its own cause, “this, having been produced, produces that.” Everything that appears can only appear because it’s conditioned and therefore, in turn, conditioning in a constant, ceaseless transforming. It’s subtle in some ways, but crucial for understanding Buddhist philosophy and psychology. And because of this conditionality (called dependent origination), “things” (phenomena) cannot precede relationship! Things can only be defined through relationship.
And so, for all subsequent moments of the arising of the visual consciousness associated with a specific object, mental images memories, emotional responses, etc. will be mixed with that visual consciousness. These immediately preceding moments of consciousness are what you refer to as “the mind’s whole universe,” which Nagarjuna calls “karmic formations,” those immaterial aspects of individual consciousness which are traces in memory left by previous actions across a multiplicity of lives of which form individual consciousness in certain ways (dispositions). And these moments of consciousness, together will serve as the condition for the arising of all subsequent moments of mental consciousness. Further, except for the initial moment of the arising of a visual consciousness of a certain object, all subsequent moments of that visual consciousness serve as objects for a mental consciousness.
Mental images, though it is possible they are subjective visual replications of an external object, they tend to be composed of a complex of images, ideas, assumptions, beliefs and emotions which are interconnected in a single image-like pattern. These, together with embodiment, are what we might call psycho-physical experience, or just the experiences of living we are all familiar with.
Om, my question was:
"What are the qualities of the actual cause?... Mind engages with preliminary raw perception with everything it knows or has experienced in order to actively make sense of it in the context of its known universe. Is this the "actual cause?" Does the preceding moment of consciousness contain the mind's whole universe?"
I have read your reply and the answer is, "Yes." Sorry if I am oversimplifying your carefully crafted reply.
When you say that the "first five material sense consciousnesses" are passive and only the sixth mental consciousness is responsive and active, I think that you are using the word consciousness to mean differing kinds of experiences. If this is true, it complicates my ability to understand what you have written. I realize that we are talking about complex and subtle matters and they require precision of language, but there is a communications problem on my end. I sometimes cannot decode the meanings. I will work harder, but I will be grateful for whatever simplifications of language are possible.
NAGARJUNA: ANOTHER TRY, BUT PILING HIGHER AND DEEPER
Arnold, I’m sure the communication problem is on my end, and I’m afraid this next post will (unintentionally!) not make it easier. I had to introduce new terms (or elaborate on old ones). I apologize ahead of time. Thanks for staying with me, while I try again. Very few people would take such an interest, so my gratitude far outweighs the energy required to make it clear. With your help, however, I’ll attempt to do just that.
I just want to stress again that Buddha’s aim in these teachings was to demonstrate how ignorance, defined as “the erroneous understanding of the nature of phenomena,” is bound to suffering. And so, developing non-erroneous or valid cognitions (perceptions and conceptions) is what alleviates suffering.
1. "What are the qualities of the actual cause?...
I am assuming that by “quality,” you meant an essential and distinguishing attribute or characteristic property of the actual cause, that is, of the immediately preceding moments of consciousness. These qualities I called mental factors, what Nagarjuna tells us are “derived from past memories, emotions and concepts (what are called karmic formations, but I won’t get into that now).” For the ordinary person, consciousness is never “raw consciousness,” it is never devoid of previous experiences. Thus, these experiences, the qualities or factors I believe you asked about, are what mold consciousness; and so, to be more precise, the “actual cause” is the immediately preceding moment of consciousness manifested (arising) vis-à-vis mental factors.
1. "Does the preceding moment of consciousness contain the mind's whole universe?"
My response was, yes, that “These immediately preceding moments of consciousness are what you refer to as “the mind’s whole universe”[actual cause/mental factors], which Nagarjuna calls “karmic formations,” those immaterial aspects of individual consciousness which are traces in memory left by previous actions across a multiplicity of lives of which form individual consciousness in certain ways (dispositions). And these moments of consciousness, together will serve as the condition for the arising of all subsequent moments of mental consciousness.””
2. "When you say that the "first five material sense consciousnesses" are passive and only the sixth mental consciousness is responsive and active, I think that you are using the word consciousness to mean differing kinds of experiences."
Here, my response was, “what is considered passive by Nagarjuna is the receiving part of the eye organ when individual consciousness makes contact with an object.” Nagarjuna considers the five material sense consciousnesses (physical organs), what he calls, the “dominant conditions” -- eye, nose, mouth, ear, skin-- passive because they are receptors of stimuli; “they apprehend their objects through the force of the objects appearing to them”. The sixth sense consciousness, mind, or mental consciousness, is “responsive and active” because of the mental factors I referred to which co-arise with mental consciousness. Mind “takes” the perception or concept as its object. It “APPREHENDS ITS OBJECTS PRIMARILY DUE TO THE INFLUENCE OF SUBJECTIVE DISPOSITIONS (MENTAL FACTORS).”
If you recall, “mental factors” designate how primary consciousness is molded by karmic formations (i.e., memory traces of experience left by previous actions), and which always arises in conjunction with a sense organ. Karmic formations are what control cognition (a process which selects specific aspects out of a perceptual field). Mental factors, which are not entities but merely descriptions of how consciousness functions, are activities of consciousness, which select and process raw data. Examples of mental factors include contact, intention, feeling, discernment, attention, concentration, appreciation, aspiration, recollection, intelligence, etc.
Nagarjuna, as I said, identifies mind, or mental consciousness as “both an “organ” [of mental perception] like the eye (which is a dominant condition for visual perception), and an immediate condition of consciousness. And so, mental consciousness requires an organ (mind), an object (a rock) and an immediately preceding moment of consciousness ([mental consciousness]/actual cause).”
The objects of mental consciousness (as an “organ”) could be concepts, images, memories, emotions, or perceptions. For example, the first, dominant condition: organ (mind); the second, object condition: object (concept/memory/emotion); and the third, immediate condition: the immediately preceding moment of consciousness (mind or mental consciousness). When the object of mental consciousness is perception (eg. Visual perception), the three conditions—organ (visual perception as the dominant condition), object (visual perception as the object condition), and the immediate condition (visual perception as the immediately preceding moment of consciousness) are all the same.
What it might look like is this: 1. a first fresh moment of bare visual consciousness (perceptual cognition) 2. visual consciousness becomes the condition for the arising of a moment (second moment) of mental consciousness, which becomes a mental perception of visual consciousness (conceptual cognition); 3. mental consciousness mixes with mental factors (i.e., co-arising with mental consciousness), such as, memories, emotions, concepts, images; 4. all subsequent moments of visual consciousness mixed with mental consciousness and mental perception and mental factors together serve as the condition for all subsequent moments of mental consciousness. We call this mental consciousness “thought.”
3. “I think that you are using the word consciousness to mean differing kinds of experiences.”
This is true (though the terms are different in Sanskrit and Tibetan), and what makes it challenging. According to Nagarjuna, there is only one fundamental consciousness, called “primary consciousness.” Consciousness is defined as “awareness which is clear and knowing.” The different usages of consciousness are due to the fact that consciousness arises and ceases moment to moment in conjunction with a sense organ and shaped by habits and mental factors, and so is experienced as a “consciousness of something,” why I said at the beginning of the post, "the “actual cause” is the immediately preceding moment of consciousness manifested (arising) vis-à-vis mental factors."
Om Mani Padme Hum
still thinking
about this.
?
?
reification of the unknowable
I cannot hear Rilke laughing. I can hear Matisse laughing when I look at his yellow curtain, but Rilke is silent—still. I’m sure he laughed; everyone laughs, sometime or other. Rimbaud is bawling, Eliot is sneering, Walt Whitman is in hysterics—hell, even Van Gogh giggles every once in a while. Some are withheld, some are over-the-top, some are joyful, others rude, still others just an act... Then there are the silent ones—Rilke, Seurat, I’m not sure I can ever hear Bach laughing (though Mozart is having a ball!)
Me? Oh, I laugh. I laugh sometimes. Sometimes I laugh a lot, and a good full laugh, one that tires me, relaxes me. Sometimes I laugh ecstatically and I come back to myself thinking, “Where have I been? What happened?” and it feels a bit shameful—I lost it. Usually my laugh is a little bit lacking; there’s a subdued quality to it... if Rilke laughed it would be forced, to please another, or else it would be unwitting—an expression of delight even Rilke did not observe. Buddha is rolling around on the floor laughing, only it looks like a half-smile and feels like true presence. Sometimes you hear true laughter, and it impresses—boy, now that’s a laugh!, and it impresses itself upon you: I remember those laughs. There’s an enjoyment in there so often out of reach—I am held back sometimes by the seriousness. I am serious about my play—but sometimes not in a playful way; I turn it into seriousness, and then I mistake that seriousness for play (and then I’m really lost!)
But life seems pretty serious much of the time, and all this anxiety to make it meaningful—to achieve something, to make something of it, to spend time in a worthwhile way. These things are important, and it seems life deserves a seriousness, that to not be very serious about life is to be irresponsible, to miss something. And we see it all the time—some people who are laughing too much are throwing their lives away, and their play is destructive, and they have no direction; what are the consequences of not taking things seriously? Though, again there is the mix-up, because this kind of play seems like no play at all—the laughter is madness, what looks like play feels like anxiety... this isn’t working; yet taking things so seriously feels heavy, a burden, so much of a weight—I can’t even laugh freely, I am taking things too seriously for that!
Where is the middle ground? Where is the space between, where we can take ourselves "seriously enough to take ourselves less seriously"?
Well, anyway, understanding is the remedy of all suffering—and I have been laughing more fully in recent months. Maybe laughter is one of the perks, and play is the path. Maybe it’s all a river, play the canoe, understanding the paddle, and laughter the pabulum. And the river is empty, of course, and maybe it’s even the unknowable—but in the meantime, since I’m still hesitant, it seems like a river to me. Before you enter the path, they say, rivers are rivers; after you enter the path, rivers are no more rivers. When you have achieved, rivers are once more rivers. For me, for now, rivers are still rivers. But things aren’t quite so serious as they once were—at least, they are so much more serious that I can relax, and play a little.
PS
i'll be going away tomorrow for a few weeks, though i'll have the internet and will hopefully be able to keep reading and posting. either way i'll soon send Noah a photo from my destination, and i'll be sure to make it a good one to share with all of you :)
HEY JAMES, WHERE ARE YOU GOING?
I hope it's sunny and warm, with lots of palm trees, lush forests and white beaches. And perhaps some parrots, too. Have a great time and definitely send us photos!
SORRY, BATMAN, I SLIPPED ON THE UNKNOWABLE!
Hey James, your last post, reification of the unknowable, is not only gorgeous, it makes me laugh, really hard. Seriously. It actually brought me to tears, because I’m what they would call a “laugher.” I’ve been blessed with an extra funny bone. I’m sure it’s karma. I was probably a clown in my last life. Or, was it this one? Anyway, I am a crier, too, which is basically just on the other side of laughter. They’re both two sides of one heart grateful to be alive, and you and everyone here on the blog remind me of that everyday. I feel so filled with joy that you’re laughing more. From what you share, it’s been a long time coming. And speaking of coming, why do some people laugh or cry when they orgasm? I’ve always found that interesting. People are so interesting. Sometimes I feel like I live on Mars and it’s populated.
Oh well, I want to wish all of you very very beautiful and deep beings of light a very merry berry New Years. Noah, you’re a gift from somewhere beautiful and I want to thank you from the bottom of my kundalini for this amazing space that, despite it virtuality, is one of the realest and funnest sandboxes I have ever had the silliness to play in.
I send you all love!
Om mani padme hum,
Pabulum
Can't write tonight
Just can't do it, just can't get the words out or to make sense, and my voice keeps coming out as a neighbor or friend's voice or as someone I don't know, because I was thinking too much or not thinking at all; but I am not giving up, I am just going to keep on going, to say what I want to say, like, the recent posts are very interesting to me and that I don't have words to talk about them yet, but am just slowly reading them for the second time, since the first time is just the survey, the entire gestalt, because I understand the parts from the whole and not the other way around. And I love you all, really love you all, in a very special way and in a very special place, because you are part of my imagination now, you occupy a space where I imagine you inside the you that you describe or question, and, I know when you are struggling to find love or find yourself or climb that mountain of depression, or are just happy and having fun with words; and I am delighted that today when I visited my elderly parents my mother sat me down for a very serious talk in which she wanted to give me instructions regarding her funeral, which was that I look my best, dress very nicely, don't look like I am in mourning, but to look as beautiful as I can. And years ago, I might have flipped out that wow, here we go again, welcome to my childhood in the land where feelings are far less important than appearances. I just looked at her and thought, no problem, I can do this for you." So, yes, of course, I will do this, I even look forward to finding the right dress and the right shoes and the perfect earrings because I will do this. And I will do it with love and a huge smile.
To all of you, an end of the year smile. And a bow. In gratitude.
A lovely left coast morning
I spoke with myself this morning.
we agreed that this year will be wonderful.
it's about time, too.
lover
I love to be adored!
But it is not for this
That I take you in.
I love to be the mysterious lover,
Beyond your reach, as you reach
Into your seeking, trusting
intuitively
that our tenderness is teaching.
I love to watch you
Breakthrough in shudder
the static of memory
and look into my looking.
I feel you letting me
hold you still,
long enough to glimpse
your innocence.
I have no idea
Where you go after we’re through,
What your mind bends around and over
or how you are.
In me you are man seeking himself.
CATERINA, A YOGA LIKE NO OTHER LOVER SEEKING THE OTHER
Caterina!!! I love your lover as your reflections on sexual intimacy, the stretching of intercourse into intercourse, and the betweenness intersecting the two paths of lovers (subjects). Of course, your lover is no longer with and in you at this very moment of reflection, and so YOU are your lover now. How beautiful a yoga of reflection! You begin this introspective journey with adoration, a double-coded dimension of playfulness, or fantasy, and a deeper desire for recognition and spiritual union.
“I love to be adored!”
To adore is to worship (from L. adorare to worship and pray).
To worship another being, a lover, is a powerful and dangerous activity. And yet a necessary one, for through adoration, one potentially goes beyond adoration.
But it is not for this
That I take you in.
I love to be the mysterious lover,
Beyond your reach, as you reach
Into your seeking, trusting
intuitively
that our tenderness is teaching.
You are the altar of worship. True worship is what sets apart the value one places upon another person, and therefore on oneself. Worship reflects one's intention, conscious and unconscious, and the ultimate awareness of the limitation of language itself. To worship a woman is to worship all that Woman is as THIS woman in her refracted forms, knowing that these forms, and this particular form, reflect (point) in some both known and mysterious ways that-which-he-seeks as he seeks himself and, perhaps more accurately, that he seeks.
I love to watch you
Breakthrough in shudder
the static of memory
and look into my looking.
The excitement engendered in the gaze of desire is the depth of that excitement spiraling through the physical form. And this round form lying in front of him and which he enters, is the yearning for existence (again!) in the other’s body, and it’s the imagistic final point (ideal) of convulsive history penetrating and tearing apart stasis through time, in an attempt to destroy the space of temporality that defines boundary.
Penetration is elevation. And the ecstasy (Exstasis) of penetration and finally orgasm both laments and celebrates mind’s efforts to transcend embodiment.
I have no idea
Where you go after we’re through,
What your mind bends around and over
or how you are.
In me you are man seeking himself.
This is the ache of mystery that sexual intimacy feels, the ache that produces its effects on the soul, and, ultimately, catharsis. Catharsis is the element in the exhaustion of orgasm that results from the `I' striving for transcendence. And in the emptying out of exhaustion, the Silence of wisdom is born, and meaning revitalized. For, at that moment, the `I’ knows that I AM the mystery, the question, and the aim of existence.
And, irrespective of, and perhaps complicated by (and therefore adding to its mystery), your self-perceptions as psychological experience of your embodied form, as well as, his self-perceptions as psychological experience, particularly in regard to other as difference, and other as like (verisimilitude), you ARE divine and, therefore, a symbol most deserving of worship!
Holy Beljolies, Om, thank you
Holy Beljolies, Om, thank you for your insightful penetration of lover! I've been thinking on this little postess poem and sharing it here with y'all. It has felt very intimate for me to share it with you. I love how simple it is. Seemingly simple. There's an artlessness to it and when I wrote it I remember thinking how I wish it were more elevated but I couldn't manipulate it further. At the moment this was my truest speech. It likes and I like its simplicity. You see into its complexity which makes me very happy (and recognized) because I know what I was seeing as I was reflecting into this relational space was a complexity (his adoration and catharsis, my psychological holding - "I feel you letting me /hold you still,/long enough to glimpse/ your innocence") though the wording, even the rhyming is fairly simple.
One of the things I'll share about the encounter which inspired this poem is how it is typically one which could be ground for judgement in its apparent lack of relational (qua verbal/time-honored) intimacy. I could have focused on what was lacking or how it would not ultimately serve my needs for relationship and intimacy but on the contrary I turned towards my lover/friend with compassion and no judgment and saw deeper into him and me through this compassion and in the tender space of that holding there was much intimacy! The key for me was tenderness and this has felt revolutionary for me. No anger, no lack, no conflict. While I love to be adored, as the poem begins, it does make me feel uncomfortable because it makes me feel somehow unreal (the danger of which you speak), but staying with myself and with him I could feel how the adoration could be reached beyond. I love how the poem ends with not knowing what the other thinks about and so the experience becomes my own, a vision of him "in me" as "man seeking himself" and so me seeing into the seeking that is engendered in relationship.
Ah.
And there is no romantic or sentimental residue for me. Which I love. Just compassion.
SEXUAL INTIMACY AND POACHED EGGS: A MOST DELICATE PROCESS
According to Wikipedia, Poaching "is the process of gently simmering food in liquid, generally water, stock or wine.
Poaching is particularly suitable for fragile food, such as eggs, poultry, fish and fruit, which might easily fall apart or dry out. For this reason, it is important to keep the heat low and to keep the poaching time to a bare minimum, which will also preserve the flavour of the food."
Thanks to Alison Roberts
Start with 4 fresh eggs, at room temperature
2 tsp white vinegar
Thickly sliced bread, toasted and buttered, and chopped chives, to serve
Serves 4
Working with 1 egg at a time, crack an egg on to a saucer. Fill a wide saucepan with water until approximately 8cm deep. Add vinegar and 1 tsp salt. Bring to the boil over medium-high heat. Reduce heat to low-medium – water should be just simmering, with small bubbles rising from the base of pan and small ripples across the top of the water.
Fill a bowl with cold water and set aside. Using a wooden spoon or whisk, stir simmering water in one direction to create a whirlpool (this will help to give your poached eggs a neat shape).
Slide egg from saucer into centre of whirlpool, as close to water as possible. Cook for 2-3 minutes for a semi-soft yolk or 3-4 minutes for a firm-set yolk, without stirring.
Using a slotted spoon, transfer egg to the bowl of cold water (this stops the cooking process). Remove and drain on a plate lined with paper towels. During and between cooking eggs, use slotted spoon to skim any foam from water surface. Repeat with remaining eggs. To reheat eggs, bring a clean pan of water to the boil then remove from heat. Add eggs. Stand, covered, for 1 minute. Remove and drain on a plate lined with paper towels. Serve eggs on toast, sprinkled with chives and seasoned to taste with salt and pepper, or use in one of the recipes on the following pages.
Tips for perfect poaching
Adding vinegar or lemon juice to the water when poaching helps eggwhites to set quickly, keeping them attached to the yolks.
Eggs purchased from the supermarket generally have a 4-week shelf life – look for those with the furthest away use-by date.
Bring eggs to room temperature before poaching as cold eggs will lower the temperature of the water.
Serving tip
As an alternative to regular bread, serve poached eggs with toasted brioche, Turkish or sourdough bread. Or try poached eggs on top of toasted English muffins, with basil pesto and sliced leg ham.
"SEE WHAT I DID?"
That was from Billy Crystal, in `MR STAURDAY NIGHT.
Speaking of poached eggs, to poach also means to encroach upon or trespass for the purpose of taking something, from the MF, “pocher,” and akin to “poke,” to thrust or gouge out. And so, we have an activity (sexual intimacy, that is), which is potentially gentle and simmering, or violent and rupturing. How about those double meanings? The beauty and complexity of language, the beauty and complexity of sexual intimacy. So, what’s the big deal about sex? Why is it such a delicate matter? What ever happened to fornication?
Mind always seems to get in the way of things. Yes, that’s it, mind gets in the way of things, it either delicately ripples like a light breeze simply in nascent states of development, or torments in tumultuous states of inner turmoil. When it delicately simmers, there is a diaphanous or transparent quality to it; when getting too agitated, it burns and reifies, hardens and gets stagnant. And, as an extension of mind itself, sexual intimacy also walks this delicate balance between deepening and sweetening, or burning and hardening the psyche or soul, certainly the heart. Yes, heartburn.
The problem, it seems to me, is when mind emerged from body. When the body had its way, that is, when instinct was the calling card, there were few complications: you found your mate and opened the gate. No decisions, confusions or conflicts on whether to ring the bell or consider whether the gate wanted to be opened or not. Things were so simpler back then, when we were, shall I say, not so evolutionarily correct.
Mind mind mind! Dagnabbit. Mind is such a buzz kill, it is so unskillful and complicated. Instead of following instincts, it unconsciously follows the historically-derived constructs of silly and dangerous (predominantly) men of power, politics and so-called faith and, in its absolute ignorance, thinks it has a mind of its own!
sex, choice, freedom
What if you don't have a problem following your instincts and find yourself fornicating with two different partners on the same day (within 24 hours but separated by two different geographical states and two different years) and then another only several days later? What if you just want to have sex with everyone you meet and like and even feel love for? Of course this isn't the case for me, but I'm just wondering. What if you find yourself just loving and feeling physically drawn to a multitude of hosts, constantly, and yet not really wanting to share that kind of intimacy with just anyone, and still wanting to cultivate something beautiful and intimate with just one?
"Ideally." And yet the One is and remains a relationship with yourself?
Sex carries a charge. Something of the essence of one seems to go with it (and not "forever" as it is replenished through rest and self-abiding). And sometimes it's all just flow, nothing is gained, nothing leaves. "It's just another way of knowing," said a dear friend of mine recently. Sometimes it's heavy and reified, like you say, Om, and sometimes it's delicate and trasparent (ahhh). But how do I follow the acts back to a gnosis with my personal narrative? Do I have to create a personal narrative? Would it be dissociative to not do so? Do i have to ask Why to all the "promiscuity" or can I just be? What if I have no problem with it? What if I just sit with my feelings as they arise and let them?
What gets "in the way" is choice. And that's beautiful. We can chose to "get down" or we can chose to sustain the excitement and just feel it, never quite talk about it, never act on it (the context seems to guide me). Mind means choice, though this doesn't mean we're always cognizant of what we're chosing. Nonetheless, we create through choice. Our freedom is expressed through making choices, through limiting (chosing) out actions, this way or that, yes or no, speak or remain silent. Of course it is not so dualistically lived, e.g. this or that, but there is still choice. And so i wonder what I am chosing when I say "yes" here and "no" there. My sense is that it's all open, not closed. Therefore, the answer to the question of what I am "chosing" is the question, "what do I see?"
I feel like an indoor exotic plant that has been raised in many diverse environments but has now been brought to a tropical climate and "set free" and is being showered in sunlight and nutrient and water and an abbundance of all things I might need and yet without a pot I don't know my limit or even if I want to expand in all directions or just hang out near the tree of moderation, part shade part sunlight, like it said once (I remember reading) in print on the little white tab stuck in the soil that came with my pot. The pot I no longer have.
Oh, it's not like I'm without a container but I feel myself stretching into a new container, new soil, new surroundings. All familiar (I know what this feels like, and that), and so feel pretty experienced in the choice department but new in that the shame is gone. Elements that are and always have been "out of my control" are more apparent to me. I am responsible to my own feelings and needs.
I still await the one who can get this too, and enjoy freedom an awareness with me.
LET’S TALK ABOUT SEX (RE)EDUC(RE)ATION
I love sex. And I love talking about sex. Almost as much as I love being intimate and talking about intimacy. So, together, they make a mean gravy train. But, I think many people don't love sex. I think they “think” they like or even love it, but it’s so fraught with conflict that the act often becomes an “act,” if you know what I mean, a mask (just to connect the blog dots). Sex is a problem, a serious problem, but the problem isn’t sex. The problem, once again, is a serious lack of self-awareness, which includes the body and mind of awareness. The problem is a severe lack of responsivity to one’s emotional depth and the inability to integrate emotion and thought. And, as a result, we take sex too seriously, and not seriously enough to take it less seriously.
“What if you find yourself just loving and feeling physically drawn to a multitude of hosts, constantly, and yet not really wanting to share that kind of intimacy with just anyone, and still wanting to cultivate something beautiful and intimate with just one?”
This is an interesting question and one I don’t think with just one answer. In the question, though, you seem to be talking about desire specifically and not the act of sexual intimacy. “Wanting” and “feeling drawn” are internal experiences, which seem to create an entirely new experience when desire is translated into a sexual act. This, of course, is where it gets sticky. But, why?
In short, I think the problem is not a shortage of sex, but a severe shortage of sexual intimacy, which is an extension of self-intimacy, which is a by-product of a relational intimacy. Sexual acting out and moralism, two sides of one ignorance, are symptoms of an impoverished ability to love. One is compulsive (and therefore dissociated from feeling), and the other rule-driven and critical (and thereby lacking true autonomy). As a result, we move through life ignorantly moralistic and emotionally malnourished. And the repression and dissociation of feelings result in either inhibition and self-deprivation, or compulsive sexual acting out and sexual obsession (do I hear addiction?). And so, the problem of sexual intimacy is a problem of lacking intimacy, or the knowledge of intimacy: this is where sex becomes dissociated from intimacy. The body becomes a tool, a chisel trying to break free of its imprisoned unfeeling self-states. Addiction, at this point, makes sense; a chemical relationship replaces an emotional and spiritual one. So, this really isn’t about morality that guides sexual behavior, because development hasn’t even achieved the level of emotional sophistication to understand what morality even means, outside an intellectual comprehension. True morality is compassion and is aligned with an ethics that celebrates individuality and freedom.
“Sex carries a charge. Something of the essence of one seems to go with it (and not "forever" as it is replenished through rest and self-abiding). And sometimes it's all just flow, nothing is gained, nothing leaves. "It's just another way of knowing," said a dear friend of mine recently. Sometimes it's heavy and reified, like you say, Om, and sometimes it's delicate and transparent (ahhh). But how do I follow the acts back to a gnosis with my personal narrative? Do I have to create a personal narrative? Would it be dissociative to not do so? Do i have to ask Why to all the "promiscuity" or can I just be? What if I have no problem with it? What if I just sit with my feelings as they arise and let them?”
What I love about this paragraph is how it is framed in questioning. You speak of a “personal narrative.” If I understand this correctly, you imply that we, in essence, create our realities, which I completely agree. Yet, the creation itself qua personal narrative, must have some guidelines, otherwise it would lack coherence and cohesion. What are those guidelines, and specifically in relation to sexuality? The first thing we need to throw out is the invention of “normalcy,” necessarily because it serves an established and biased power structure which undermines individuality and human freedom. This is particularly relevant when discussing sexuality-- sexual choices (behavior), sexual orientation, sexual identity.
The philosopher, Foucault, made an interesting observation; he said that sex itself was a relatively recent historical construct, that is, the meaning of sexuality relative to constructed truth. And truth, according to Foucault, is the product of power. We transform truth by changing the structure of power. Thus, norms and notions about normalcy must be questioned. You can see how this level of freedom could be terrifying to perhaps most people. To live without questioning and following an established norm does have a degree of practical and psychological justification; it speaks to a conservative spirit that says: “So long as it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change. Freedom, and therefore change, by its very nature, requires a constant adjustment and assimilation that might feel dangerous. Freedom requires tremendous responsibility and intelligence, it doesn’t mean anything goes. There is an inherent ethic built into freedom if it’s a true freedom, that is, one based on a cultivated self-awareness. For example, decisions and choices made from a position of freedom must reflect a logical and self-consistent reasoning, and also must be formulated from inferences that consider the consequences of those decisions. The ultimate acts will either confirm or fail to confirm the reliability and usefulness of those decisions regarding one’s health, growth, and relationships, of which an individual is intrinsically connected.
So, Caterina, in answer to these questions: “Would it be dissociative to not do so (create a personal narrative)? Do i have to ask Why to all the "promiscuity" or can I just be? What if I have no problem with it? What if I just sit with my feelings as they arise and let them?” I would say, they all must be explored, deeply and responsibly relative to one’s fundamental needs of self-care, recognition, and well-being, and emotional and intellectual and spiritual growth.
In your hermeneutic inquiry, you say it best: “What gets "in the way" is choice. And that's beautiful…. we create through choice. Our freedom is expressed through making choices, through limiting (choosing) out actions, this way or that, yes or no, speak or remain silent…. And so i wonder what I am choosing when I say "yes" here and "no" there. My sense is that it's all open, not closed. Therefore, the answer to the question of what I am "choosing" is the question, "what do I see?"”
And I think that ultimate choice for sexual intimacy will be made through this observation: “I still await the one who can get this too, and enjoy freedom an awareness with me.”
Fornification
Caterina,
I want so much to respond to your post but think there is probably so much space between what you are saying and contemplating and where I go with it. I feel this with a lot of the posts: do I even understand a fraction of what is being said? I could jump in so many places and completely miss your point or questions… how to find a way to meet you in your poetry and physical space. Not unlike sex. Finding a voice, finding a rhythm, creating a dance with another person, and taking off into the unknown.
“What if you don't have a problem following your instincts and find yourself fornicating with two different partners on the same day (within 24 hours but separated by two different geographical states and two different years) and then another only several days later? What if you just want to have sex with everyone you meet and like and even feel love for?”
I started reading your post and thought, ah, this is about sex…. but came to realize that it is about much more – finding out who you are. I don’t think following one’s instincts is an issue unless you are being hurt by or hurting someone because of it – but can’t help wondering why you used the word fornicate, which sounds so cold and mechanic.
Are you asking if it is OK to follow your instincts without having to filter what you do through a theory? Is it alright to just tear off your clothes and have fun, have your needs met, without having to judge?
I think our choices contain what we want in the moment, what has happened in the past, and how we envision the future – all of that, and who we want to be.
I so understand what you are describing about wanting to love, to spread out, to take everything in. A million times I have fallen in love with people, boys, friends of my family, strangers on the street, women, men, to the point where I ache. I feel that I have so much love that I could wrap my arms around everyone, that I could make love to everyone if given the chance, but I know I need some kind of boundary of understand around me or else I will self destruct..
And your post brought back a very fond memory for me. I was in college, home for a visit, when my mother apparently found my birth control pills. Unable to confront me directly, my mother told my father and asked him to speak to me. The memory is so close …. My father is sitting at the kitchen table. My mother is standing in the doorway behind him. To put this into context, my father and I never spoke about sex. He is very uncomfortable watching a movie with a sexual scene. So he clears his throat and says, “Emily. I don’t want you to be promiscuous.” To which I reply “No need to worry. I choose who I sleep with.”
LOL! EMILY, IT MUST BE SATURDAY NIGHT
Emily is dancing up a storm! And she's killing me!!! LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Saturday Night and dancing
I keep rereading Om's first line of his recent post, " I love sex,"
Can't get much beyond that, as much as I try. Too many random thoughts just keep on rolling. Now, I am not commenting on love and intimacy here - just pure and simple sex - and I have not really encountered many men or even a man ( although I know they are out there) who did not love sex - and I am happy to report that many of my male clients - mostly demented in my life of work still love sex. Have you ever seen a man who needs help walking holding onto a woman's breast to steady himself. And as my thoughts and memories keep on rolling another memory comes to mind - In my early, early career, I was a social worker at a large apartment for seniors. My office was a glass bowl in the center of the lobby. No kidding. Glass wall. An elderly gentlemen, a bit drunk, came into my office and walked right up to me, unzipped his pants and peed on my shoes.
The only thing I could think of to say was " I am not a fire hydrant."
Men and sex. Cookies and milk. this way and that..... It's dance time.
not yet sure what I am seeking to share
“Emily. I don’t want you to be promiscuous.” To which I reply “No need to worry. I choose who I sleep with.” LOL!!! Oh god, I love this!! Emily, you're killing me!
I love sex too and I love talking about it, but don't get to talk about it nearly as much as I would like, and not because I would talk about it "more" but I would talk about it in a different way, with a different quality. I have not been sure how much I would share here though and that is why my posts have been somewhat vague; I guess I am testing the waters.
I love your responses, Om, Emily. Emily, you ask why I used the word "fornication". I was borrowing it from a previous usage that Om had made of it. It's not a word that I use often or ever, except in that post. I think it's a funny word though. it sounds biblical like we're supposed to see fire raining down around two lovers intertwined and screaming in agony while demons prick their bare hides with pitchforks.
Ahhhh. Sex.
I have travelled far and deep and wide with sex and know many different levels of sexual engagement that range from the very spontaneous and non-intimate athletic kind to the time-honored and trust-cultivated deeply intimate so much so that sex is not even close to describing what that embrace feels or looks like.
I have been through many phases with sexual intimacy, phases and recapitulations, cycles and returns, forward leaps and shifts. One thing I do know is that I am in a different place in my relationship with sexual intimacy than I have ever been before. Something has shifted. It feels less "sticky" for one thing. It feels more flowing and more compassionate.
More on this, perhaps, from an italian internet spot (I'll be in Rome for 3.5 weeks starting Monday).
I am too tired and unclear to write anymore tonight. Have already written a lot and erased. Just want you to know how much I appreciate your responses.
rearranging deck chairs
In that they put their feelings and sensitivities at the center, Caterina and Emily are talking in a way that (to the best of my understanding) expresses a feminine viewpoint.
From my male perspective, sexual experience is intensely physical (i.e. penis centric and penis driven). Emotional intimacy is part of this picture, but it emerges out of the physical experience rather than, for the most part, preceding it. And, especially when one is younger, that drive for the physical feels like a huge ache.
And the point of all of this pressure is orgasm. The overwhelming intensity of orgasm completely rearranges my consciousness. It is a passage into a brilliant and new world. This rebirth is so intense and revelatory that, except during a relatively brief recovery period, I am never satiated.
Human encounters cannot be simplified into simple formulations. Depending on the circumstances and the nature of the connection between the players, there are so many dramatic and subtle variations on the ways that they play out. Long term, committed relationships have benefits in communication and compassion. Short term adventures are exciting and finite.
None of this is news. I mention it because I have learned that men and women are different, especially in their expectations and approaches to sexual encounters. These differences can lead to misunderstandings and worse.
I do not know if discussion here can improve the situation for any of us, but maybe.
Dang it, Arnold! I'm suppos'd to be packing
Ah, wow. Shoot... because I wasn't going to write on the blog for a while because I have to focus on packing.
But I gotta say first that I love your post Arnold.
Not having a penis I cannot say that I know exactly what you are talking about but I can say that I have experienced sexual desire as a very physical thing. One recent attraction I would say feels to be an almost entirely pure, high grade, uncut, unfiltered lust, with nothing attached to it (and has been physically painful at times). Of course, it is only apparent that the desire arises on its own and not from a psychological base. Even in this case.
And perhaps especially in this case.
But it is true, I do not separate my feelings from my body, even if my feeling is not so much emotional, but is just an awareness, a light pleasure to be in the body, or in the form of desire. I will always probably be centered in feeling even while I'm thinking, wondering, pontificating or "packing."
I wonder if younger guys (and not older?) experience the physiology of sexual desire (and it's pain) like women experience cramps... and while the man's fantasies and blood are pumping, women's hormones are plummeting us into darkness and possibly the desire to kill.
I would like to make a vote for recognizing that while what you say is true (men and women are different when it comes to sex) I know it is also possible for men to approach sex from feeling and for women to be less attached in sex. Ah this is a huge and wonderful subject.
It is more important to establish the terms of the norm (what you are describing Arnold) and then to explore the meanings of what is eccentric.
For it seems both men and women evolve when it comes to sex eventually (men discover an ability to talk about their feelings and emotions that might be attached to physical intimacy and women learn to be more separate psychologically and play more). But I could be wrong. I really don't know much about man's experience. And I think what you are describing needs to be honored and taken literally.
But I wonder if it is all men's experience?
Perhaps cramps and menstruation are the perfect examples to help us women "get" what a sex drive is like for a man, at least it's involuntary and physiologic base.
loving everyone's comments
by the way.
I am totally distracted and want to go deeper with you all in some of these subjects. But I am loving what's coming out/up here.
A PENIS IS JUST A CIGAR
I have to admit that when I hear statements about what is male and female, I cringe. I have, if not always, then consistently put my “feelings and sensitivities” at the center, even when I make theoretical statements! I would agree that it is a “feminine” view, but not necessarily a female one. Not because male and female biology are not different, they clearly are. And biology does codetermine behavior and even psychology. But, as someone who also is suspect of simple formulations, I am wary to make statements about Venus and Mars.
I begin with the assumption that, for human beings, mind creates reality, even if that mind is embodied and has brain correlates. And so, even if sexual experience is intensely physical, the drive is inseparate from mind’s perception/interpretation of that drive. I think this is most important because all the rest of (what we call) sexuality is what-we-think-it-is based on what we have learned. Another way of stating this is that sex is no longer just an act, it is now a component of identity.
For example, merely because it looks and feels that way, I think it’s fallacious to make an assumption that sex is in the body and that men and women are different, not because those assumptions aren’t partially true, but because they cannot be any more than partially and, more importantly, relatively true. As a hetero- and phallo-centric culture, we’ve been conditioned more to our differences than to how we are alike. This is true in how we view race as well. I argue that for human beings, sex is more in the mind than body, irrespective of the fact that we use our bodies to have sex. From this perspective, sex (as we define it) is an invention and, I would agree with Foucault, the result of cultural repression. What we attribute to sex must be understood as being attributed from a particular and therefore, limited, lens. That these generalizations might have orienting properties are more descriptive than meaningful. That is, just because most people behave and even think certain ways, doesn’t mean that these behaviors and beliefs are pre-existing. Emily’s father was taught that women who have multiple partners are promiscuous. I wouldn’t doubt that he thought men who have multiple partners are, well, just men, and enviable at that. I know quite a few women who have had many partners and they’re not men, male or masculine, nor are they “promiscuous,” because promiscuity is a male-generated term that they haven’t been fooled or manipulated by. I also have known men who have chosen not to have multiple or any partners, and they are healthy, loving human beings. Monastic life comes to mind here.
Caterina has said she experienced sex as a very physical thing, too, like Arnold, but I don’t understand how either one could experience that physicality as a pure physicality. If so, where did the mind go? Regarding heterosexual relationships, I agree that “men and women are different, especially in their expectations and approaches to sexual encounters.” Not because there IS any fundamental difference, but because they were taught that there is a fundamental difference, and the positive balance is typically on the male side.
And what about homosexual relationships? What happens to the male/female dichotomy? These are all important questions that I appreciate go beyond one’s personal experience, but I’m a strong believer in questioning our assumptions regarding anything we think IS the way it IS, especially sexuality.
And so, my main point is this: to unsilence what has for centuries been concealed in sex and transform it into discourse.
To quote DH Lawrence, "There has been so much action in the past, especially sexual action, a wearying repetition over and over, without a corresponding thought, a corresponding realization. Now our business is to realize sex. Today the full conscious realization of sex is even more important than the act itself."
Sex and Sleep
I would love to comment on sex but tonight sleep seems so much more exciting to me. I am rolling over. I have a headache dear.... no seriously, just tired.
Let's talk sex
I have been thinking about nothing else but sex over the last few days. It’s been eating me up, making me obsessive, bitchy, tired…. I didn’t want this thread to die!. I imagined myself writing some lovely, poetic, description of sex, and discussing the male versus femaleness thing but it was all bullshit. Not connected. I don’t know a damn think about anyone else’s sex life, other than my own. And I don’t have a clue how to talk about it. I mean, sex is sex; sex is everything. Sex is life and death. Sex is a meandering path through some rain forest; it’s a sudden dip on a roller coaster. It’s the Nazi’s coming after me, the rapist down the street, the prince, the slightest glance, the smallest tickle. It’s an adolescent boy being led by his penis and a young girl understanding her power. It is two old arms and legs tangled around each other.
I can’t really understand anything for sure until I splash my own stories on the wall and take a look.. Sex is not one thing…. It’s where you get to from where you are now.
This is my first memory. I am four or five years old – I know this for certain, since I see myself in the house in the suburbs where my family moved when I was five years old. My mother is meticulous and tries to keep her three daughters spotless. I don’t know about my sisters, but I am a slob and I couldn’t care less about my hygiene. When I go to the bathroom my mother or father usually comes in to make sure I have wiped every dribble after I pee. My daddy likes to fold the toilet paper into a nice, thick square before he wipes me. I remember the last time he did this. I remember it because it was the only time I remember thinking about it as something to think about. It tickled. Just for a second. But it did. Maybe, he knew. Maybe he didn’t. But either way, he never came into the bathroom with me again.
And PS The opening in my father’s pajama bottoms (that he made sure to keep snapped) was disgusting. I didn't really know what was behind that door, but I didn't think I wanted to find out.
• .
Hello....out there
Wow. I feel like I'm out here alone....hello...my wayward friends. I am willing to talk about anything, and I mean!! there is nothing I won't talk about if I know how I want to talk about it, because talking about it without really knowing about it, is harder to undo than to do in the first place.
EVERYTHING, EVEN SEX, IS SEX
Emily, I hope everyone (if anyone is left :) can appreciate what you created here; just the sheer force alone shut my computer down for at least three minutes before I had to reboot it. Your unbridled surge of desire reminded me of a film I saw recently, `Lust, Caution.’ I didn’t know what it was about initially but, part of the way into the film, I was suddenly overtaken by a sex scene so powerful I lost my breath. With the inundation of porn, there is never a shortage of penis and pussy; but, this was way different. This wasn’t about genitalia, it was about desire overcoming everything else, everything, even death. Desire gone wild. It blew time, space, and caution out of existence. Existence no longer existed, just passion breathlessly sucked through these two bodies, now one.
I almost had to cover my eyes in much the same way I cover them when a violent scene is hurled at me. The senses are flooded like a tsunami swallowing up land.
Yeah, unbridled, that’s what you feel like in this post. And promiscuous. You are swallowing everything up in your path, whether you’re meandering, dipping, preying, praying, glancing, gazing, or tickling.
And I ask myself, “am I so different?” And the answer is, “Yes” and “No.” I know that force only too well; I lived it and very hard. It’s familiar and it’s beautiful in its pure form. But, it’s also highly risky and fraught with death, because it destroys what it desperately tries to possess. “It’s been eating me up, making me obsessive, bitchy, tired…. I didn’t want this thread to die!”
Against that very desire to possess, it has to give up that desire if it is to be transformed. The desire itself has to be transformed, otherwise it will take you down. And when desire takes over everything, anyway, I don’t believe it’s real pleasure anyway; it’s addiction. Been there, done that. It ain’t fun. And no one will convince me otherwise, particularly because I have been there and dying it, hard, wild and without a center.
But, I really didn’t have to give it up completely. In fact, I found a way to preserve the energy that fuels it (something you never lose, and I have lots of it) and use it for a higher rush: in the world, it charges my imagination; in silence (sitting), it breathes me out of existence.
And so, Emily, I know what I just wrote will never feel like what you wrote, despite me feeling what you felt and sending it back at you. I love what you wrote and I love what you feel. I even lost a little breath as I was riding it. And I really get it and want to hug you for the gift of me feeling it. I think we both experience it (and say it) in similar and very different ways and that’s beautiful, a real yoga.
Who really cares? I include it all and celebrate it all. Why not? It’s all sex, isn’t it?
Connection
Here is the thing about connection: it's the wild horse, and it's so free and unbound that it hurts. This is desire before transformation. It’s pushing all the time: this great possibility of loving everything simultaneously and running with it. But sometimes, like Om says about desire gone mad (into addiction) it’s too fast and too raw, and without boundaries, it is lethal. That’s when it hurts the most. I can’t abort the feelings – the overpowering, maddening, near addicting feelings of love, even if I really believed that I could or wanted to; but theses feelings can't stay in their raw form or else I will not be here, as I am, writing these words. I will be curled again under the blanket, staring out, holding my breathing, begging for something to stop the pain that was just a few moments earlier nothing but pleasure. Maybe the wild horse wants to rest from its wildness, not lose it, but sit with it, make peace with it, share it with a fellow traveler. A sweet scent is always blowing in from somewhere, like the first hint of spring, when the seams of your flesh begin to rip. You lift your head, flare your nostrils and take off with abandon. It aches in the knees, it aches in the breath, it swells in the darting eyes - do I catch up or be caught?. The horse’s eyes, so deep, so sad, so stilled, but wild beneath. It is part of me. Part storm. Part quiet sea. It is a tear falling from inside a wail.
???
"begging for something to stop the pain that was just a few moments earlier nothing but pleasure."
Not sure I understand this part of it, Em?
Is it because the passion feelings become so overwhelming that they become hard to contain? If so, do you judge them so that the judgement creates guilt and the guilt causes the pain?
Beautifully written, by the way.
pain
sometimes,the feelings of love/joy become so overwhelming that it hurts - really becomes painful. It's not guilt. Just the sense of being overwhelmed by my own feelings.
Hmm! This one is hard for
Hmm! This one is hard for me to understand, not because I don’t know anything about being overwhelmed by my feelings but because I also understand that in me there is always a transition when I experience such a shift.
I was brought up by a very strict mother and a father with a larger than life personality. My mother never let me have my own feelings so that in adulthood, whenever I experienced strong feelings I did not know how to handle them. So I tried to rationalize them, avoid them, ignore them and suppress them. Overall though, there was always this feeling of guilt that made me feel ashamed at having my own feelings, my own opinions or thoughts. If I did have any of those, it would take a strong surge of anger to break through the guilt. But mostly, I would shutdown rather than feel what I felt.
So in your regard, Em, I imagine there has to be some sort of mechanic that triggers the shift from joy to pain. I am not assuming it is the same shift I experience, but there has to be something that makes it all come down.
Or maybe there isn’t one and I am just looking for a reason where there is none. Interestingly though, last week I was depressed, sick with the flu, all alone in my new apartment. I isolated myself and enjoyed it for all it was worth. Even my stocks took a beating this week and the sky was going to fall on me. But today I suddenly came out of it. Why?
Well, physically I feel recovered from the move and the flu. Secondly, today was a beautiful day in NYC and the warm air gave me hope. Third, I managed to express myself in this blog, which broke through my isolation, and I went to the gym and talked to there people there and exercised. I made a concerted effort to connect to my own feelings. And though I am down many thousands of dollars in my investments, the fear it created just dissolved when I stopped trying to control that feeling. I guess I experienced faith in me, faith that I can connect to my needs and feelings, and that faith gave me hope and then everything aligned perfectly and I found myself happy.
the container of no self = witness?
"sometimes,the feelings of love/joy become so overwhelming that it hurts - really becomes painful. It's not guilt. Just the sense of being overwhelmed by my own feelings."
I imagine at a certain moment the notion of self comes in, a notion that one is meant to contain or hold these emotions, that there is attachment or even judgement. I imagine a sense of loss and a desire to hold, to hold onto the moment of joy. And so the sense of being overwhelmed. But then, I have been overwhelmed, simply through the gravity of certain ideas and their accompanying emotions, but still, the feelings of being overwhelmed seemed to follow upon me searching to contain everything that was "happening" (as i perceived it was happening... i.e. to "me").
Like tonight, after talking with Grazia, the woman who holds her finger on the pulse of this project for which I find myself in Rome. To tell in documentary form the story of the roman jews and the nazi occupation, the before, during and after. She is a child of people who lived through it, and some who didn't. This is HER story, and that of her community. While we discussed the various possibilities for how this thing might continue to develop and including some grand names of people who might be willing to contribute in some way, I began to feel overwhelmed (as I often do with this project) but realized that I was feeling that way because I had just invented a self that was supposed to make it happen and carry it forward and blah blah blah, and who am I to be doing this, WHO AM I??!! It started with gratitude then developed into feeling overwhelmed then I noticed I had created a self and then I let it go and felt better.
CATERINA, ROME IS AFIRE
At least that's what I heard. What a strange coincidence it's at the same time you arrived :)
Please share if you can the developments of your project. i would love to hear about it.
Also, don't overexert yourself with all those selves running around. Try to keep it in one container, and then we can poke holes in it.
mille baci!
Hey, Em, still here. I have
Hey, Em, still here. I have been lurking while moving into a new apartment, nursing myself over the flu and feeling lonely and depressed because I was alone and liking it somehow.
And through all this time I was thinking about sex, going back to memories and times, even looking at porn and having sex with myself. But the porn is the quick rush, empty calorie-cookie with no vitamin C! And the memories of past relationships is what keeps me going.
I remember as a child crawling around under the table on my belly and getting this incredible thrill at looking at the maid’s feet and legs and underwear. I just felt happy and safe.
In early adulthood, I remember a summer night when I traveled to a girl’s house and we just sat on the front steps talking under the muggy stars in the drippy, orange light of the street lamp on a quiet street in a typical Queens neighborhood. And we just talked because I was too shy to reach out and kiss her, but her lips glowed and her eyes shimmered and though we didn’t have sex that night, or even kiss, the sexual tension of that moment is the brightest memory from that relationship, and one of my fondest.
And then in adulthood, not too long ago, I remember waking up in the middle of the night and making love to a woman, and she looked perfect as she breathed heavy and I swept back her hair and told her, I would always love her. And she just smiled and couldn’t say the same though I think she felt it.
Somehow I look at all these moments, searching for navigational points so I can find my position now and plot my course later. And then I realize sex is sex. Something so grand it is hard to contain and contrive even though it is meant to run free.
Anyway, Em, the point is you are not alone trying to make sense of it all.
Hello Niko
So glad to hear your voice.
Your story of the riding the bus made me shiver. I remember, as I guess we all do, being in that world of adolescents/young teens and the mixture of cruelty/friendship/ relationships. Or being the one who is the outsider. I am sure that I have more to say, but my mind has just dimmed the with the afternoon light.
Emily , Please tell me more
Hi Emily, I was drawn to the innocence of your story and the way you realted to this stream; thanks for sharing it.
I also do not know how to talk about sex, I have never been comfortable talking about it and it is even more unnerving on a forum such as this. I guess the only way to undo the bundle of nerves is to dig in and try to talk about it.
'Sex is not one thing…. It’s where you get to from where you are now.'
This is very poetic and sounds like the perfect description, I have reread it many times. Yet I am struggling with taking these words and giving them their own meaning and my own words. It is as if I understand the concept but can't explain the concept to myself which confuses me because it means I do not understand it at all.
A Penis Story
Talking about the meaning of penis!
Riding on the N train recently, four adolescent girls got on at Union Square going uptown. Three black and one Spanish-white.
When the doors opened and they came on they scrambled to find seats. One girl, heavy and black, chose to stand by the door. Her other two black friends found seats in the corner. This left the Spanish-white girl, slender with long black hair, having to choose if to stand with the heavy girl or go sit down with the other two girls. She chose to sit down.
Now this is where it gets interesting. Because the girl left standing felt hurt, she says to the slender girl, “I see how it is.”
The slender girl just smiles, trying to justify her desire to sit down. The girl left standing then says, “That’s alright. I see. That’s alright, Ashley, you can suck my dick.” And she smiled as she said this in an aggressive tone
I heard this and immediately all these questions popped into my mind.
Like, why would a young, black girl say, “you can suck my dick” if, obviously, she doesn’t have one? Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to say “suck my pussy?” Is this girl fantasizing about having a dick for Ashley to suck some way of feeling empowered? But why a dick? Why not a super-pussy? Or a juice-tit?
Also, why is she picking on the Spanish girl? She takes no offense with the other two black girls who sat down first and left her alone. Is it because she feels she can bully Ashley? Is it because Ashley is slender and she is heavy?
Plus, by choosing to remain standing, the girl made her friends have to choose to either sit down away from her or stand with her. She could have just as easily stood close to them. But she didn’t.
And what was more surprising, was how matter of factly and casually they took these words, “Suck my dick.”
Of course I couldn’t help thinking of the racial component in this. I felt that if this girl talked to her other black friends this way, they would have defended themselves much better than Ashley did by just meekly smiling it away.
And somehow I felt sorry for the girl who said this, because she didn’t have a better language to express herself to her friends. It is not that the words are vulgar, but it is that they lack so much and are packed with so many other meanings that do not help any type of dialogue to express what needs she needs met.
But then again, what do I know about modern adolescent lingo? Not much. So the term “Suck my dick” in that context might mean something totally different. But I just can’t help wondering why this girl would identify with a penis she doesn’t have (at I believe she doesn’t have)?
At 42 Street, they get ready to leave. Once again, the girl starts picking on Ashley. She says, “Come on, Cracker, let’s go. Cracker!”
Very softly, shy to even say it, Ashley responds, “Don’t call me Cracker.”
And yet they were all behaving as friends!
nico's N ladies
I love how you peel back the layers of complexity on this dialogue overheard on the train. So many of the fantasies of feeling and racial tension, too, though probably not at all far off, have to also come from a context that you recognize and carry in your own mind. You are the reader and author/witness of this unfolding event. Your story speaks to the power of racism; that even if we don't want it to exist, we see it, hear it, read it as formative context in social interaction, because it's easier to see (why the race card is easy to throw, just like weight and gender... and sometimes homophobia, zenophobia, and age-ism) than the vulnerability of the people throwing around insults. While the vulnerability and defensiveness are also obvious, the race card is so powerful. I can imagine this same story, nonetheless, amongst a group of white girls, in Boothbay, Maine. You didn't describe the other black girls as being "slender" so my feeling is that you struck on a typical "picking-on" ceremony that heavier gals do to the thinner gals. Though the "cracker" comment exposes how much this standing girl is also using race as a weapon of humiliation.
What is interesting to me about this story is how you see the dimensions of the standing girl's shame deriving from her weight, racial identification, gender, and developmental age group! All of these identifications, with which she is struggling and trying to shape into language, are just fuel for the fire of her desire for recognition. You see this too, which is why I love this piece. I also like how you point out that she created the event by standing first, causing the others to either join her or sit, though it could have initially been out of an act of seeing that there weren't enough seats for them all to sit together and so she chose to stand. Then erasing her act of thoughtfulness by being a chumphead (did she anticipate/assume her friends wouldn't appreciate her gesture? Is she, in her bullying ways, really an accommodator?)
The "suck my dick" thing is interesting, obviously a mimicking of boys' speech, but perhaps it's a new "thing" amongst girls (you know how we're always adapting to what's the cool, most edgy thing to say in junior high). I don't think she meant it literally or even figuratively (i.e. that it could even be replaced with "suck my pussy" etc) but more for "punch" value, for "cool/edgy" value. Way edgier even than guys calling other guys "bitches" or "nigger".
But the value, of course, stems from a mutual recognition of the contexts that are being born (inherited and regenerated) in their budding languages, in their/her interpretive communities.
I love this story, nico, and wish it could be something presented and discussed in a group of young adults, asking them what they think was going on. I know some teachers of nyc schools who could make some awesome use out of this piece.
Great points, Caterina. I
Great points, Caterina. I agree with you when you say I am creating most or all of the finer points in the story (depending on how much reality is real). I guess the reason I didn't use much descriptive language for the other two black girls was because they didn't say much and they looked average. The other two stood out because of their differences (laurel and hardy maybe) and the tension in between them. Also, I wouldn't use the word racism because I am not making the claim that one group of girls is superior to the other. However, there was a clear racial component to this as I percieved it. but then again, it is nyc so trying to understand the customs and language of another race is just part of the experience. but it is a true contradiction to say, we are different but we are all the same.
poached synchronicity
My mom has these little porcelain egg poachers decorated with delicate flowers, as though the vision of them should inspire the kind of handling in the process of making the eggs. I was admiring these little poahcers over my recent visit to NH. I've seen them all my life but re-saw them now because she has moved in with her boyfriend (also a delicate procedure) and has placed them in a prominent position on a shelf in their kitchen. I remember her making poached eggs for me when I was a kid. This recent visit I asked her if she could make poached eggs for me again. She described the process, and said yes, though we never got around to making them. Interesting synchronicity for your post, eh?
Tonight
I am at odds with myself tonight. A wandering mind, a sense of purposelessness – not a low depressed kind of feeling, but more a sense of suspension, a disconnect from meaning. It is the transition space which has always caused me to swim against the current, to fight stepping into the next moment. Although I don’t love the space I am in I lack the energy to change it. Writing helps, but I fight that too. My lady in my story has been waiting for days on her little bench for me to arrive and take her somewhere or just sit down beside her but I keep putting it off. May tomorrow after work related errands…. I need to commit, but …. What is wrong? I feel the day slipping away, a day never to be retrieved and I am letting it go as if it didn't matter. My head is heavy. Perhaps I am tired or getting sick. I can never tell the difference between physical illness and illness in my mind – a real struggle to read the signals. I feel the energy move down my arms like it is being pulled from my chest. Perhaps, I should just give in and sleep. When to sleep? When to fight?
Ah, and speaking of sex (doesn’t it always comes back to this) my mother recently said to me that if she and my dad wanted to kill themselves they should probably try to make love. He’s 90 and she’s 87. Now, when that time comes, I will always wonder what they were doing.
Noah
You are a poetry major, yet I have never read your poems. Poetry is without a doubt, something that I am utterly clueless in, seeing as I am a child of prose, but one only needs eyes to see your talent. After I read your poem over several times, as one must with great poetry, I still found myself utterly clueless. Alas genetics have no role in talent. I can offer no deeper insight thank this: your love of nature is astonishing, you have a kind heart and a gentle soul, and you will see much death in your life, but you will persevere and be stronger for the loss.
She asks. I answer.
2:47 and I was sitting in my free period bored out of my mind, so I started rooting through my computer and came up with this. It is a poem I wrote in my freshman year of high school. It struck me as interesting, particularly because my mindset is so similar now as it was then.
(1/25/05)
She asks.
I answer.
Why do you get up when you are tired?
Because I have to go to school.
Why?
So I can get good grades.
Why?
So I can get into a good college.
Why?
So I can get a good job.
Why?
So I can make money.
Why?
So I can live.
Will that make you happy?
Maybe.
If you are unsure, why do you work so hard?
Because I am afraid that I will ruin my life if I don't.
What about having fun?
When there is time.
What if there is never time?
Then life will be no different than it is now.
What if after all your hard work you do not want the life you have been working towards?
I don't know.
Does it scare you?
Yes.
Making happy
I've learned this past year I will never be happy until I master my music. Working as a musician, with not much money, has showed me that, and all the wealth and riches of the world will come with that in time. It almost allows me to breathe easy having an idea of where I am going, although there is no way to make the obstacles any less daunting to overcome as they are. I wonder sometimes, how much money do I need to make to be happy? If I am so connected to my music, inside of it, and it inside me, until there is no inside or outside, will I need anything other than that?
Today I will take a break from the song writing binge I've been on the past couple of days and go see if my bicycle is where I left a month ago (!). If it's not too late I will climb the hill of Jing Shan park which over looks the forbidden city and offers a wonderful panoramic of Beijing. In spite of the pollution, I'll take generous breathes of air to honor my body and remind myself, with each breathe I am on the cusp of life and death itself.
may the beauty you love be what you do
that's a loose quote of Rumi, me thinks.
This is Beautiful, Oubenning.
I relate to it very much.
Chosing to do something you love is scary, especially if the task of focusing on it is not financially focused. I think you chose this passion because you feel connected when you are engaged with it. I can see this from what you write. Being with this connection draws you deeper into your faith, into your knowing.
The connection is real and will provide. Everything will work out. It always does. And the money doesn't necessarily have to come from your music directly but from a life you've cultivated to create space for your music. Or from elsewhere. In anycase, you will be provided for. You can practice faith in this. And be happy that you already know how to tap into something that you love like this! What a gift!!
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Anya
Perhaps there were other reasons you worked so hard for good grades. Are there?
Mastering
OuBenNing
Ah, I keep thinking that I wish you were happy while you were mastering music and not waiting until you have mastered it to be happy. I would think, not being a musician, that the relationship with one's music is something that takes place over a lifetime and with each peak, there is again a valley, and another peak to climb. I think people have no choice but to follow their hearts if history, fate, etc, allow it. And money..... now that's a topic. It certainly doesn't make one happy, but it can make life alot easier. It is really a question of how much you need in order to do what you love to do.
I hope that at some point I will hear your music. In a way, I already do.
Hard to keep up
Thinking about sex
I can't help thinking
about home;
coming back to that
safe warmth
in which I have spent most
of my life.
Where I first made love.
And first cried over a boy.
Lately I have felt as though
it were no longer the place for
me.
Torn between this blissful
feeling of comfortable stagnancy
and
the unknown.
I just cannot keep my mind
on sex.
I drift off and think about
groceries
or work
or the skin on the back
of my hands.
But then again,
maybe I just need a good fuck.
I like this poem very
I like this poem very much,Ceili. And the last line is the kicker. Though I like the dissociating habits of distraction even more because I see similars in myself. What's that about?
poem and distraction
Perhaps....we put off pleasure. Maybe some crave it all the time and some are fearful of it. Maybe there is a middle ground where everything is possible.
Dinner with some Bones
I was taking an art class once, at Cooper Union.
Six hours on Saturday, standing up in front of an easel and drawing with charcoal. At the beginning I hated charcoal. and the class felt awful. By the end, though, I really appreciated it. (Funny how that happens.)
One day the student teachers brought in a skeleton for us to draw. I danced around it for a bit... drew a femur and a skull. Then, when I was attempting to render the whole figure, I found myself getting more jittery; wanting to sit down or talk or get away somehow. I looked around the room and noticed that almost every other person was doing the same. Now, my postulations on this subject, I am sure, were just another excuse not to draw the object.
However it led me to think..
The skeleton, one could argue, is the most intimate view of the human figure. Nudes make us blush, but skeletons make us cringe. Why is this? I cannot rightfully speak for anyone else, but for myself I noticed that I felt uncomfortable staring at the frame that keeps me stable. I could imagine each of the bones being mine, and how could I draw something that is so deep, so personal?
Obviously there are other reasons to cringe.. the idea of mortality. Or the notion that underneath the different skin and attitudes we are all just bones. Or that childhood fear that never quite receded.
Anyway, all I am trying to say is that intimacy is delicate and dangerous. Sex is not necessarily the same way, but I suppose right now for me it is. As I tend to wander off in my mind, the same way as when I was looking at that skeleton, years ago.
Why does your mind wander, Nico?
My mind wanders when i worry
My mind wanders when i worry of the future and forget about the present. When i let it fool me into thinking i can imagine the future and somehow control it.
Then i find myself not knowing if i locked the door on the way out or if i turned off the stove after making coffee or if i took my vitamins in the morning. i think back on those times and realize i have vague memories of what i did and what i experienced. i was lost in my head and failed to experience everything around me. i guess it is fear at the bottom of it all. fear makes me wander aimlessly.
ps Damn that math question was hard!
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"But then again,/maybe I just need a good fuck."
Ceili, I’ve had this line dancing in my mind all week and have had so much fun with it. Sometimes it’s like a bird and other times it’s like a hook that won’t allow me to shift out of the fixation. That’s what I love about it. And I’ve been wondering, “What is a good fuck?” Or, is that irrelevant. For me, it either leaves the poem as needing a good fuck or elevates it to tantric heights, not because it has any spiritual expectations, but because it wants to grow out of itself, or rather, the poem’s `I’ wants to transcend “home” in order to find a new one, one filled with the mystery of herself she longingly seeks but is in conflict letting leave home to reach it.
“Torn between this blissful/feeling of comfortable stagnancy
And/the unknown.” I find this line disturbing. How is stagnancy comfortably blissful? Or, again, is that the point? I have a need to question it though. Unless the “safe warmth” of home is that bliss.
And then, of course, there’s that sex thing, the mystery and unknown of itself, breaking girls’ hearts and yet offering up something really blissful. If only we had a handle on it and didn’t let our emotions get in the way. If only I could get a good fuck to shake me out of this complacency or ambivalence, without the complications of making love.
But, as I rip my shirt pulling myself off the hook in order to open my wings, I still wonder, what’s a good fuck?
To catch a mystery one must think like a mystery.
Om it seems as though I can give you no answers. You have hit upon my thoughts pretty accurately. The hook and the wings. The freedom and the imprisonment. The tether and the wind.
Maybe something that shakes you out of your stasis.
Maybe something that leaves you sore the next day.
My family had our annual New Years' tarot reading last night (I was away on the actual eve, and I'm leaving again soon). As my father flipped over my cards I met the reading with some resistance, later realizing that I was reticent due to its accuracy.
Basically it summed up something like "Existing in a state of comfortable stasis right now, I will have to plunge inside and outside myself to new lengths in order to achieve a beauty of spirit and purpose, sight and creation; one which has been hitherto unavailable."
I paraphrased quite a bit..
But sounds familiar, right?
I guess that mystery is looking pretty good right now.
As for your spiel about time... I could go on for pages about time. To keep it short I will say that I feel it pass in waves and trickles, seconds and centuries.
Anyway, all tangents aside, I am sure that you have given me more answers than I could give you.
Have fun with your hooks and wings ;)
I'LL HAVE TURKEY ON RYE WITH A SMEAR OF MYSTERY, PLEASE
Cieli, I love tarot. A very dear Buddhist friend of mine is a master with tarot and we have spent many hours “playing” with the beautiful insights generated from the cards. What I find with tarot (like all things so-called oracular or intuitive) is not so much the cards but the deep intuition of the reader(s)that bring the cards as a kind of heightened mirror to their full potential as sayers and sooths.
I love your father’s “hand,” a good call indeed. How did your family get into the tarot kick? I think it’s awesome.
“I will have to plunge inside and outside myself to new lengths…”. What I like about this statement is how it covers both interiority and the conventional dimensions of consciousness, going deeper within to dismantle mind’s old forms (beliefs, etc.) and make some concrete changes in your life practice (which I believe are merely by-products of interior change). I would love to hear ho that goes for you. Keep us updated :)
As for time, definitely share more thoughts about it, that is, if you have the time :)
And keep those delicious poems coming in, they’re provocative and penetrating and have been making for some great discourse.
Tarot: it's about time!
My family has been into the cards for a while; I was born with it. (My father teaches T'ai Chi for a living, whattaya expect?)
We particularly enjoy this one deck called "Tarot of the Spirit" by Joyce Eakins. It is a touch more guided toward inner harmony and subconsciousness but really gives a great, soulful reading.
I find that I can meditate on one card for a day or a week.
Definitely check it out, even if just to admire the delectable artwork.
Sadly I do not have time at the moment for lingering discourse on time.
Though one thing I will say for tonight, is that when I think about time it rushes by me. But if I clear my thoughts I can stretch it out. Therefore it seems to me as though "time" is a fallible measurement for something that cannot truly be measured.
Now I retire to dream of Dali deserts and Miro colours
THE JOY OF FRIENDSHIP, THE FRIENDSHIP OF JOY
I had one of those unusual moments today of meeting a new friend. I only mention this because it’s one of those precious things that really opens my heart and brings me joy. Like meeting all of you, I feel so grateful you’re all in my life. It’s not any specific thing, just the knowing you’re in my heart and stretching it beyond what it was before I had met you. I find my heart to be so vast, really, beyond what I can even conceive. And, each time I read your words or think of you, or meet you, I am reminded of that. So, thank you and you and you and, especially, today, my new friend who, once again, reminds me of why I’m here, and here.
Om mani padme hum
The Logging Road
I’m saying self-delusion
is the sower
of mind's creation, and
self-love its dissolution,
as you follow behind
then beside me breathing in
the alliteration of green
against gray sky.
We are walking down the road, a hanging
valley a hundred thousand years before
was glacial floe, with the headwall
at the edge, where the kettles and caves
beveled out landscape, and bastions of rocks
like reliefs hung over what is now
the cool umbrage of wood.
We see three small birds building nests:
a yellow-throated warbler high-chipping
to the undergrowth and what waits
there; a black-hooded one
with white tail spots, behind
a beech, long-warbling with beak full,
and a goldfinch, perching down low
on a black cherry's arm, waiting, then
lifting in the time I turn to see it:
the trees bloom yellow blossoms.
Your father tells me the road was named for
the gatherers of wood a hundred years
before, as they pillaged deep into the forest
as if it would go unnoticed, the stripping land
of trees, the peeling away of wood, leaving
stumps and mutilation like nuclear waste;
he eyes his birches like Frost dreaming he could
swing like a boy in spring his father’s trees;
but your father doesn’t need to wrestle,
doesn’t need to test his muscled arms
and axe the birches to the ground.
He sees his birches as vertical altars
like totems like living gods their fingers
adorned in black ringlets, and is happy
to find the ones that had returned to earth
naturally, where he will find plenty
in the furrowed bark-husk of dead wood;
and like a watchmaker with hairspring
he will guide the goading motion of ax
against bark as sun stretches across
the bending blade.
Most of the time our walks are in silence
we are here to listen
we are instructed to learn
what works and what doesn’t
what signs and pointers pass through
the forest like the involution of mind excavating
down under its earth, like birds recapitulating
the motion of wind through wing, like time leading back;
and there is something in the sharing of silence
where history speaks wood and stone
where the floe of glaciers impressed
walls and moraines,
and bulldozed across
the landscape;
where the ice retreated
and the lakes shrank,
where the chattermarks
and knobs sculpted rock,
and plants and animals
migrated into landscape
that grew trees
and drew birds
before the road would ever bend
for the loggers stripping wood.
Between the half-crumpled fronds
and pine spurs in the taupe
and redolent rock of day, light
converges like love
from a remote depth
emerging from earth
from miles beneath ice
before ice before words could claim
that we are the aim of the universe
and from stone came art and utterance,
and from utterance came word and road….
Friendship
This evening I have walked so quietly and gently down the Logging Road, seeing behind and above me and beneath my feet.
I am so grateful for this solitude and friendship.
Here
It's amazing but I had a similar experience today. It left me with pleasure and hope and confidence.
MORNING THOUGHT
What makes relationship so sacred is the fragility of its presence and the resiliency of the heart that holds it with the utmost fortitude and care. Open that heart wide enough and the sheer intelligence of reason will reveal the truth of its own design: to guide the heart through a most strenuous journey toward the light.
Night
If I had something to say tonight I would say it. It's quiet. Just sit here beside me. Let me look at you for a moment. It's all I need.
MEDITATION TONIGHT
I sit here amidst words, thousands
upon thousands
of words, all pointing
the way toward Paramita, that
other shore across the sentient sea. And
these words delight me, as toys delight a child.
My father gave me
words, for that's
all he could give. Words
were my father's presence: "Don't ask
for anything other than presence. Don't speak
of a `you' apart
from That. An empty
container cannot be more full.
Be whole, and nothing."
LET ME LOOK AT YOU THIS BEAUTIFUL MOMENT, THAT'S ALL THERE IS
What actually appears to us as present moments
is nothing more than what happens during these
moments, the constant changes occurring which
we identify as present. It is an infinite string
of occurrences, but never “this moment,”
which only is, if we only open ourselves to it.
This realization came to me today as I looked back
at something I had written 15 years ago. As I
read it, I realized that everything still is, right
at this moment, even though the contents of
time have radically changed. It was a powerful
realization, a sharp contrast of the evidential
against direct experience. Clock time watches
me shift into “middle age,” and all the external
changes of time unfold before me, including
my death at some point in the future. There is
much evidence to qualify this. But, my direct
experience tells me that everything I perceive
external to this eternal presence of now--
consciousness itself-- is illusory; it exists but
is not real.
What makes time seem real is our identification
with the contents arising out of consciousness;
this is ego, what the Buddhists call ignorance.
This is why I sit day in and out, to stop the
traffic in my mind from tricking me into its
appearance of reality. Suffering is only this.
The moment the traffic stops, time dissolves
with it and in its place is Awareness. I used
to spend my days existing and wasting time;
my focus now is only awareness and ending
time. Even when I step out into traffic, I find
awareness pulling me back with its finger waving.
getting pummeled by traffic tonight
looking back as a way of looking forward, looking forward but really looking back. Nice to read this tonight, Om. A reminder to me.
This moment is the journey.
To believe otherwise is to leave hope bereft of joy—
NOAH, MAYBE YOU NEED A GOOD
session of sitting ;)
PS, HEY CARMEN, I MISS YOUR POSTS
You mentioned having difficulty finding your way in, I hope that's not the case. What's going on out there in the Midwest and in the classroom(s)? I miss your posts and poems and hope you make your way back!
thank you, Om
Last year, as a getting-to-know-you exercise, my poetry professor had us write an exquisite corpse in ghazal form. Each of us wrote two lines and passed it to the next person. Fortunately for me, the last one, my name is a compound word, so including it in the final stanza as stipulated by ghazal convention actually worked.
On the last day of class, the professor asked us to bring in the poem, edited down to something we liked. Mine went like this:
wildlife
jungle birds swarm against my eyes
blinding me with the greed and hunger in their eyes
finding whatever they can use to survive
life behind the line of sight they see with open eyes
clumsy, lumbering, tearing at the canopy
with claws and razor beaks and searching eyes
two eagles devour the pregnant mother hare
and all the young unborn with unopened eyes
a birdwatcher loses her sympathy in the rot
it’s just a cycle, she says with telescopic eyes
they are here, and you are not, you are not
here, outsider. I open bleary eyes.
the flash of the horizon breaks my pupils wide
to suck in the light through the holes in my eyes
and the birds are gone. I get out of the car,
men on the radio speaking of snow. the first flakes lash my eyes.
It doesn't make much sense. I'm not happy with it as a poem. It's out of my artistic control; it's awkward and stumbling; the meter is off. I don't think I would have used "eyes" as my end word. It doesn't have a changeable enough meaning. I don't know why the speaker is suddenly in a car, other than I was pressed for time and that is the first syllable of my name, or where the birds went. Was it a dream?
This is a little bit how I feel right now. I'm not happy with myself as a poem. My bits don't fit together properly. The bits that I thought fit don't really. (Translation: my boyfriend broke up with me, though that is not the root of my dissatisfaction.) And underneath it all, I can see the happy Carmen, writing love songs to the heartbeat of the city, but now she has the right to be left alone; I would only upset her.
I realize this doesn't make much sense. I do not have as much of a personality disorder as you might think from listening to me! It might just be the winter talking. It was a beautiful thing to see my name here. To hear someone calling my name. Because I am here, and I am listening, even if I feel very quiet on the inside right now.
THERE SHE IS!
Thank you for coming back, Carmen, even if it’s for a brief moment of “hello, I’m here.” It’s the absence that brings the presence so close, and to receive a response from the absence is what relationship truly is. We can’t always be present. I would say if we could make 15 minutes a day that would be awesome. And, when I say “present,” of course I mean present to the relationship. Though we know each other here on the blog in obviously limited ways, there’s a unique trust and genuine caring that IS real. It’s just in different form, less embodied, if you will.
Despite the sadness I feel around your boyfriend breaking up with you, I am so happy you shared this (and are here!), and I especially love this: “I'm not happy with myself as a poem.” This line inspires me tonight, thank you. We are poems, creating ourselves in relation to other poems and hopefully with the greatest care and tenderness struggle can buy. And we necessarily and perhaps often “don’t fit together properly.” I think that’s cool if we can tolerate what’s intolerable long enough to realize that what we think is intolerable is really, truly, deeply unreliable as a perception and judgment, most of the time. Even if we could perfectly fit together, I wouldn’t want it. I just want love, imperfectly and passionately, but with the greatest care and tenderness money can buy.
So, actually, everything you said does make sense, right down to the light through the holes in your eyes. Come in and out as much as you need, as you’re sorting out the pieces and parts of your poem, but just don’t leave :) Emily would have one less person to take care of, and that’s not good!
PS. I never heard of a Ghazal, so I looked it up. It’s originally Persian and from the Arabic, which translates to 'to talk with/of women'. WOW! Ghazals are intended to be sung. Is this not cool? So, here it goes, I'm inspired :)
I sang a song tonight, it came from lips so open.
I prayed and sat tonight, it came from mind so open.
The center of our pain is so small, it is mostly nothing.
Yet so big the fall when we forget that our hearts are open.
In a thicket of birds, in a darkness too vast, I laid with no rest.
But, in the morning I move on to where the forest will open.
And I will use words, for I am a poem after all.
And I will stick it to the dark and drag it into the open.
And flood the blog of my dream with songs that, at rest,
Om their way like waves of love across your hearts, now open.
talking of women
If you want fantastic ghazals that don't quite adhere to the letter but work fantastically with the intent of the form, try The Clerk's Tale by Spencer Reece. I read them all one summer and fell a little in love with him, with the form, with the way of thinking. Stopping at the end of the line. Completing the thought. Cherishing it, moving on.
Over three hot road-trip days that summer, I wrote a piece originally entitled "Highway Ghazals" that later became "Americana," then "Highway," then just "Wanderlust." At the time, my family and I were driving all of my things out to my first apartment, my first real step towards the promised freedom of college. (Hehe, wow I was a kid.)
So the poem's grown and changed with me. Pieces have gone out and back in as I become happier and sadder, more prone to travel or more content to stay. I've ripped it apart and stuck it back together and it's never done, never satisfied to rest. I think that's appropriate.
But anyway, I love the idea of ghazal-as-woman. I can see her bending to pull water from a stream. The feel of the breeze. She sees a fish. The summer embraces her. She dances away, and smiles. Sweat beads at the nape of her neck. Her hands do not droop. She perceives all and each thing distinctly and she tells the poet who writes the words. It is an imperfect translation. She is forever further on.
Wanderlust
i.
Above the Susquehanna, bridges spin like spider webs.
The roads are held captive by numbers. Only the insignificant bear names.
Old steel towns hunch beneath decades, their church spires blackened.
They are built of brick and determination. They will outlast the marble of grander things.
This is freedom: eight lanes and a guardrail. White dashes snuffed into darkness,
tank of gas, oil topped off, the exultation of snowflakes as they frost the windshield.
In another life, I might have been a trucker: open road at two in the morning,
shaking towns before their fingers catch in my unbound hair.
ii.
Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, there was a princess.
The prince’s horse couldn’t gallop sixty. She left him to a wheat field and hitched a ride west.
We haven’t spoken in three hours. My hands rest on the skin-warmed steering wheel.
You know what? he says in wonder, The inchworm is proof of the existence of God.
Truck stop condoms cost a dollar in the women’s restroom.
On a whim, I buy a strawberry-flavored one. It tastes like latex and windfall apples.
No matter where the road twists, two things remain constant: NPR and baseball.
We pause for nine minor league innings while hot dogs settle like summer in our bellies.
iii.
Christmas trees grow in tight formation, rows and columns.
I think of Arlington headstones. I wonder whether the trees are atheists.
I follow names that taste of bustle and border crossings. Savannah, Chicago, El Paso.
Though I am a stranger, this is my land.
Roads shimmer with the changing seasons, tremble at my passing. I am ancient.
I am new like the first snow, like the dripping of icicles.
Nothing sings like the siren’s ecstasy of tires against blacktop.
Cars abandoned on rusting lawns know this to be true.
Gray and not knowing
Sometimes I don't know anything, not even what I am going to do when I leave my desk. I sometime think if everyone I love is doing well, then I'll be just fine, as if I have no boundaries of my own. Is everyone well? In the midst of doubt do you have hope? It is alright if I just sit on my bed for hours and stroke the cat or just stare out the window at the woodpecker on the tree across the alley? What does a day add up to? How do you measure the meaning of a day? What are you doing? If I could reach out and touch you, if you could tell me that you are fine, that you will be fine, I could rest, but that makes me dependent on you and if that is true, then I can not be what I want to be for you, for me. You have to be free to flounder the way I flounder and to fly when you can. I would absorb your pain if I could. As self destructive as it is, I would take it in, take it from you, if I thought it would help. Taking in your pain, frees me from my own. I want you to know all the things that I don't and to be free of the struggles that hold me.
I am going to leave my desk. I am going to look outside. I am going to ask myself, " What's next" and choose a direction .
Isn't it great that it is as simple as you say
I love this Emily, [I am going to look outside. I am going to ask myself, " What's next" and choose a direction.]
I've been feeling unbelievably elated the last few days. Everything is more clear and I am just so much more awake and aware. I wrote pages and pages and really felt inspired. The last two days I was actually brought to tears a few times with joy--an experience I can not say I have ever had before. I didn't really know what to expect from all these great feelings.
This morning however, I woke feeling a little angry. And I thought before this gets the best of me I'll choose to not get wrapped up in it and I sat for a few minutes. I felt much better, sitting had helped a lot, and I said just that to my self, 'What's next' and the rest of my day was pleasant.
Isn't it funny how it really is that simple and if we ask, what's next there will be something right there in front of us to grab and take a hold of.
SITTING ON THE KNOCK OF THE WAY WATCHING THE MIND ROLL AWAY
“And I thought before this gets the best of me I'll choose to not get wrapped up in it and I sat for a few minutes.” I just love when I here about someone sitting. Thank you, Megan. It’s quite a miracle, really. And that’s probably because sitting aims at the most ordinary state of mind, what an insane world cannot understand. “I felt much better, sitting had helped a lot…”. Well, of course, sitting always helps, even when goop gets in your eyes, or mind jumps around like a monkey and can’t be still, or when I’m so tired I fall asleep, only to find myself still sitting when I awake. There’s no such thing as a bad meditation, it’s all grist for the mind mill and projection factory. But, after sitting, I always feel better. Not even a good fuck can have that consistency! Oh yeah, I know, riding the waves on good vibrations and feeling the rush and the tush and the ecstatic bliss of it all. But, sitting, even Megan’s elatedness eases into it along with clarity and wakefulness as ego unzips itself to let Being in. Even if just for a moment, that moment will never be lost, never be hijacked again for too long, because you have tasted that silence. Ah, silence, I’d package it but it would get just too noisy.
ON THIS COLOR WHEEL, GRAY IS THE ABSENCE OF BLACK AND WHITE
Emily, I’m trying to find myself inside this lovely and painful soliloquy, trying to feel myself in there to sense what you are meaning, beyond the words. I'm particularly struck by this thought: “You have to be free to flounder the way I flounder and to fly when you can.” What initially feels incredibly onerous, suddenly opens up to a strange freedom, the freedom to “flounder.” But, can suffering be a freedom? Is this freedom, or do you mean "control," the type of control suffering takes when it wants a room of its own?
To me, this stance feels like a directive, "role" with the punches. It might have its own sense of sweetness, but I'm not sure even Dustin Hoffman should take on this tootsie role.
SHE GHAZAL
She said, Beyond that we have nothing to talk about. I
see myself a diver on a cliff, arms outspread, holding the sky.
My hands are the sunlight. Pushing outward from knees bent, I
fling into the air in an arc of nothingness. I am beyond what I
was and will be, suspended. There is nothing but the eye
of storm in a space beyond fear, beyond the lifting off, the fly
of body in space around a world that neither exists beyond I
nor the staked claim of its existence below the outspread sky.
My arms open to a love that has claims to stake beyond its reach. I
om the words that seek, and in that space of love the words before me die.
WHY MY LAST GHAZAL WAS AN UTTER FAILURE :)
Ghazal, in poetry is a form consisting of five to fifteen couplets (sher), which share a rhyme and a refrain. (The word "Ghazal" is pronounced roughly like the English word "guzzle". The ancient form originated in the 10th century in Persia (modern day Iran). It is derived from the Persian qasida, which in turn derived from an Arabian form that can be traced back to the 8th century. Ghazals were written by the Persian mystics and poets Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi (13th century), Hafez (14th century), and the Turkish poet Fuzuli (16th century).
The Ghazal spread into India in the 12th century under the influence of the Mughals. In India, Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869), Altaaf Hussien Haali (1837-1914) and Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938), were the masters of Ghazal in Urdu as well as Pharsi (Persian) . Although the Ghazal is most prominently a form of Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi poetry, today, it has followers and writers in many other languages.
Through the influence of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), the Ghazal became very popular in Germany in the 19th century, and the form was used extensively by Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866) and August von Platen (1796-1835). The Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali was a prominent proponent of the form, both in English and in other languages; he edited a volume of "real Ghazals in English."
The Ghazal is a common song form in India and Pakistan today. Strictly speaking, it is not a musical form, but a poetic recitation. Today, however, it is commonly conceived of as an Urdu, Hindi or Punjabi song, with prime importance given to the lyrics.
Details of the form:
A poem of five to fifteen couplets.
The second line of each couplet in a Ghazal ends with the repetition of a refrain of one or a few words, preceded by a rhyme (though in a less strict Ghazal the rhyme does not need to precede the refrain immediately).
In the first couplet, which introduces the theme, both lines end in the rhyme and refrain.
There can be no enjambment across the couplets in a strict Ghazal; each couplet must be a complete sentence (or several sentences) in itself.
Each of the couplet must be treated as a separate poem, thematically and emotionally complete in itself. This couplet is called a 'sher' in Urdu and Hindi.
All the couplets, and each line of each couplet, must share the same meter.
The last couplet may be (and usually is) a signature couplet in which the poet may invoke his/her name in the first, second, or third person.
DOES ANYONE REALLY KNOW WHAT TME IT IS?
After sex, I think time is our greatest obsession and what causes the greatest pain (besides religion :) The scholarly world (and thus the world culture) once believed in absolute and universal time. This is time defined by the movement of bodies in space flowing the same way for everyone and everyone sharing the same past, present and future. In absolute time, time and space are distinct; time never interacts with space (this is Newtonian time). It was Einstein (who, in school, was no Einstein) who dismantled this myth of absolute and universal time with his theory of relativity. In Einsteinian time, time is relative and dependent on the motion of the observer. In Einsteinian time, time and space are interrelated and complementary; when time stretches out, or slows down, space contracts. “Shrinking space changes into lengthening time.”
Einstein once said, in response to his friend’s death, “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” For the modern physicist, at least, time is now motionless in an infinite gaze (which is different for the Buddhist, by the way, because motionless implies a reality that is also independent! Time’s absolute nature, according to Buddhism, is its emptiness, that is, its lack of inherent existence).
So, what’s my point? I have no point, that’s my point. Everything we have been talking about here on the blog from the moment God said to Noah, “If George Bush hasn’t beat me to it, I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them, and besides, I’m getting bored of video games. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth, and especially that place on Second Ave. with the bad sushi. Oh, yeah, and Sam Harris. So make yourself a blog of biodegradable virtuality; make rooms in it and coat it with photos inside and out. This is how you are to build it: The blog is to be infinitely long, wide and high, and well you’re a kid and know more about the internet than I do, you’ll figure it out. I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all life under the heavens, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish. But I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the blog—you and your community of strangers with you.” Everything spoken of here in this ark park-- intersubjectivity, relationship, intimacy, transference, reification, etc.-- comes down to time or, rather, our belief in it as absolute and universal.
“Time, like space, exists only in relation to our experience; it is a concept linked to a perceptible change.” And so, take away conventional or clock time, and there is no space for time to exist in; take away space and there are no longer concepts that, because of time and space, exist as convention.
Step outside of past, present and future and you have a fourth time, which lies outside “duration.” From the perspective of meditation, in the purest instant of presence, you will recognize mind’s “empty and luminous nature” within the transparency of the world. “Here,” in the true mode of existence, you rise beyond any concept of motion and space, movement and being, or motionless and not being, the One and the Many, birth and death, and all the suffering between.
Moron Time.
Time, like a mocking-
bird
calls out to me
waking me from slumber
stirring in
me
a want for peace
and quiet.
So! time. time. time. time is money.
First of all, I have to point out that I believe you attributed that quote to Popper when it was actually Einstein who said it. I could be wrong, though, but I always heard it as Al's.
"'Time, like space, exists only in relation to our experience; it is a concept linked to a perceptible change.' And so, take away conventional or clock time, and there is no space for time to exist in; take away space and there are no longer concepts that, because of time and space, exist as convention."
Well said, Om. I want to make a quick connection to Martin Buber's I/Thou (Ich-Du) relationship, as well as the I/It (Ich-Es) relationship. These are what we spend our lives vacillating between, trying to attain balance.
Time itself is relationship. As my father says.. "if there is an object there is time. no object, no time. in a nirvakalpa state (formless awareness) there is no time"
What I want to point out is that the simple separation of self from object A or person B creates this perception of "time." I am not the toaster, therefore time and distance must exist between us. How long will it take for me to walk to the toaster? How long will it be before I eat?
Because it is highly improbable to live one's life without these separations, the governing norm has become the regular notion of clock time. It is a common ground on which we all stand, and on which we can mostly agree.
When you get into the trippy stuff, time seems to fizzle out like smoke. When Ken Wilber goes into a deep nirvakalpa state (http://youtube.com/watch?v=LFFMtq5g8N4&feature=related), we see his brain waves shrink to the most minimum of Delta activity. At this point he is present but not mentally separate from anything. There exists no time, no nothing. But it is ready and waiting as soon as he wakes up.
The Fool in a tarot deck stands in the void, the state of readiness. Anything is possible, and all is one (or "none") until a step is taken.(a precarious step!)
Time, like consciousness, is constantly in a state of change and fluidity. No longer do we have to think of the stodgy grandfather-clock of the old days.
So what good is time to us? It is as fickle as a beautiful woman. As ephemeral as smoke.
Anyway, forgive any incoherence of this rant.. I have just recently been reunited with my roommates and I am a wee bit tipsy.
PS: That whole Mayan calendar ending in 2012 thing... I would stand to reason that we are headed for a monumental shift in consciousness and the perception of time. Or perhaps it is just phooey.
ABSTRACTION TIME < :0=(
Ceili, great post. Not bad for a tipsy girl ;) Thank you. Yes, it was Einstein who wrote, in a condolence letter upon hearing about his friend, Michele Besso’s death, the now famous quote: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” It was Karl Popper who called Einstein the “New Parmenides.” I corrected the post :) Anywho, you might find my responses, a few posts back, relevant to this conversation on time (
NAGARJUNA: RESPONSE TO ARNOLD
and
NAGARJUNA: ANOTHER TRY, BUT PILING HIGHER AND DEEPER
). This is the Buddhist philosophical take on mind’s relationship to all phenomena, including time. Ah, Wilber, nice to see him mentioned. I know him well. I highly recommend his `Brief History of Everything’ and his grand opus, "Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution." Impressive is an understatement. What resonated most for me when I first began reading Wilber was that, as a theoretician, he is first and foremost a developmentalist (ascribing stage sequences to development). Structuring consciousness in this way opened up a whole new paradigm of thinking about spirituality and its relation to psychological growth and health. The nirvikalpa state you referenced in your post, that Wilber “became,” is what the Buddhist translator, Edward Conze (I’m not crazy overall about his writing), calls, "undiscriminate cognition," Conze says, this cognizance “knows first the unreality of all objects, then realizes that without them also the knowledge itself falls to the ground, and finally directly intuits the supreme reality. Great efforts are made to maintain the paradoxical nature of this gnosis. Though without concepts, judgements and discrimination, it is nevertheless not just mere thoughtlessness. It is neither a cognition nor a non-cognition; its basis is neither thought nor non-thought.... There is here no duality of subject and object. The cognition is not different from that which is cognized, but completely identical with it.” This is what is called Rigpa in certain schools of Buddhism, Pure Awareness as the union of Emptiness and Cognizance. “Time, like consciousness, is constantly in a state of change and fluidity. No longer do we have to think of the stodgy grandfather-clock of the old days.” This is so true, but the word “consciousness” gets sticky here. What you are calling “consciousness” refers to “gross” and “subtle” levels,” the level of brain activity and self awareness, respectively. The “extremely subtle” level of consciousness is the “fundamental luminosity of mind,” the Pure Awareness of Nonduality. These last two are comparable to and overlap Wilber’s psychic, subtle, causal, nondual levels or transpersonal states of consciousness. Again, these states are all overlapping (eg, the lower reaches of the subtle, Wilber calls the "psychic"; and the union of causal emptiness with all forms he calls "nondual."). These so-called levels of awareness might all sound so abstract, but they’re actual states of consciousness we all have access to. We might call them parallel visions of reality because they include both conventional and higher, transpersonal levels of awareness. We would experience a subtle state of awareness, for example, in lucid dreams. Lucid dreams are where you are aware that you are dreaming. The idea, through prolonged contemplative practice, is to transform these states into permanently available patterns or structures of consciousness (on a continuous and conscious basis), the aim of which is to alleviate suffering.
Time goes by too fast... how do we slow it down?
I might be missing the point as I was reading this on my treo as I ran late to work. This made me think of something I was talking to my friends about recently.
Why is it that when you are a kid, time seems to extend so far. A day out in the sun can seem endless, a car ride or sitting in church trying to be quiet feels like it will never end and waiting for the next school vacation seems to take an eternity. Yet as an adult you can't slow time down, you are always running out of time to get everything done--planning for the next quarter; the next year; looking at P&L results from last year as if an entire year of experience can fall as flat as a bunch of statistics on a sheet.
Holidays just merge into each other and your next birthday wakes you confused as if the one before was just yesterday. It seems that as soon as it is finally Memorial Day you don't even get a chance to finish peeling off your socks and feel the warm worn board’s beneath your feet before you look up and the coolers from the Labor Day celebrations are being closed.
Om, what is your theory on why time goes by so much quicker as you get older?
Mind The Time
One thing I've thought about--each day you age, that day becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of the total number of days that you have lived. Since time isn't fixed or Real anyway, the scale of our measurement keeps getting larger. Those slow moving days of childhood seemed so free of responsibility. There was much less perceived past or future to project our "self" or "ego" (or whatever you want to call it) onto. I don't necessarily think we are doomed to live in an ever accelerating sense of time, but it would take real intention and persistence to learn to quiet the mind, and all its projections about the past and the future. These seem to get longer and longer (making the present seem smaller and smaller) the more we age, the more attached we get to the idea of en enduring self existing through time, as opposed to being now. It is like the present starts to get squeezed out by all this "past." At least thats what its like for me. Silly mind, minding all this time. I guess now I really have to go sit.
hurtling by
Well. I am kind of an old person now, and I remember how long the days and the seasons were when I was young. That kind of time seems like an artifact of consciousness.
But there is another time that we can measure more objectively... things that happen in the physical world that we measure with dependable instruments... calculated intervals.
My experience of my life hurtling by and through me is something completely different, and in the end connected to the pleasure of experience.
All in a minute
Ready, set go…. In one minute I can travel backwards to my kindergarten class, raise my hand to go to the bathroom, be ignored, pee on the floor, remove my underpants, throw them in the trash when the teacher isn’t looking, get back to my seat and hope that the teacher doesn’t notice. What happened after that will take another minute to tell.... and I just don't have the time!
Hugs to all my blog friends.
Hugs Emily
This is great! Made my night. (I couldn't post back last night had a virus on my computer) I love your stories.
Great context on time, thanks
I've heard a similar rationalization that each day becomes a smaller percentage of the total number of days you have lived. But you have done an interesting thing here, added another level of understanding that I hadn't thought of before. By looking at our own perceptions and adding the ego it makes sense that we feel like the ‘present starts to get squeezed out by all this "past."’. (I love the way you put this) I can’t count how many times I say, this much time has gone by and I still haven’t accomplished xxxx. I think it will take an awful lot of sitting to overcome that, but hey we have a lifetime, an infinite amount of time... ;)
This day will soon be at an end and now it's even sooner.
"You're older than you've ever been
and now you're even older..
and now you're even older..
and now you're even older..
You're older than you've ever been
and now you're even older..
and now you're older still."
Altered mind/altered time
As I mentioned before on this blog I work with people with dementia, where time as we usually know it doesn’t exist. A woman who moved into the home began telling people after three weeks that she has lived at the house most of her life while someone else who has lived there for four years believes she just came for the day and is waiting for a ride back to Tennessee ( and hoping that I could drive her). As the present gets erased, time has an entirely different meaning. I can visit someone at the house one day and when I return I have, in their mind, either never left or haven’t been seen in months. It is all perception, even with a diseased mind. When someone says they haven’t seen me in months, then I acknowledge what a long time it has been, since time has a different meaning for both of us. And in this time/space I am also seen as someone’s mother (even if I am decades younger then they are, or they recognize me as a high school friend – occasionally I am a teenager, a daughter, a distant cousin. Time for me is altered when I enter this world. Today is yesterday or five decades ago. Roosevelt might be President.
Today, when I visited, during the first snow of the season, one of the women was a child again, begging in a little girl’s voice, to go out and play. But because it was too dangerous to take her out – I filled the bird feeder outside the window and when the birds started coming, we sat on the couch by the window and watched. Time stopped. We were just who we were racing neither backwards or forwards. All that existed was the two of us and the sparrows and chickadees
TO EVERYTHING TURN TURN TURN
Emily, I find myself sitting with you and this woman (who could have been my dementia-ridden childlike mother)on the couch, and really sitting in the spaceless and timeless presence of mind, and she our teacher speaking the great truths of no mind and no-self; and, as great teachers do with the greatest of love and care and compassion, she points with her finger to the sparrow without even a peep.
Thank you for this, tonight's gift.
Reminder for tomorrow morning: I am grateful I'm alive so that I can cultivate compassion for all beings, without exception.
tick tock
I think when you're little everything takes longer and time doesn't really matter because you just care about accomplishing your tasks. The future seems like a whole world away. For me time goes fast, slowly. Each year seems to speed by but when you look back, it took so long to pass. And if you really think about universal time, our time on earth is probably like a second of existence all together. So I guess it is more about what time is related to, like personal/relational existence...
MEGAN, GREAT QUESTION
And I’ve thought about this a great deal, how perception itself creates what we call reality. The subjectivity of time is the key to understanding the nature of time. Noah is really on here I think, particularly in showing how time “feels” accelerated as we get older. And Tanya’s observation, too, that “time is related to… personal/relational existence...” and is, as Arnold states, an “artifact of consciousness.” Aside from the phenomenology of time experience, I’ve also wondered about the biology of time, that is, how the brain changes over time through the encoding in our DNA structure and how it perhaps prepares us for death (in the same way it prepares us for life and development). For example, I remember when a very close friend of mine died of brain cancer when he was 35. I was young and imagined myself dying and no longer having the opportunities to experience simple pleasures, such as, music, food and sex. It was very disturbing. Now, the thought of death has very little impact on me in terms of what I might miss if I die. Aside from my prolonged contemplative practice, I imagine some brain mechanisms operating which increasingly minimize the existential dread usually associated with one’s own death.
Though all mental functions have brain correlates, it is how we experience time that is important. From the biological end, biologists tend to label three time domains: circadian rhythms, which control things such as sleep and wakefulness over the 24-hour period; millisecond timing, which is involved in fine motor tasks; and interval timing, the system through which we consciously perceive the passage of time. All of these domains are regulated through brain structures that produce chemical changes and electrical waves, which in turn, coordinate movement, attention, memory, etc. Time perception is expressed through these domains. Because of brain involvement, time perception can be altered by drugs but, more interestingly, can also be significantly altered by different mental states such as depression, arousal and meditation. This is the subjective or psychological side of time perception which is, for me, the most important.
The illusion of the conventional or clock time aspect of experience is always occurring and so the eventuality of death through awareness necessarily causes the feelings associated with “time flying;” however, as we’ve been demonstrating now for a while, this experience, like all experience, is subjective and therefore relative to how we perceive and interpret external events. If we realize, for example, that all phenomena, including time and death, are empty of inherent, independent and permanent existence, a more reliable perception and conception of time will ensue, one in which we can literally step outside of time and thus not feel the anxiety and discomfort inherent in conventional belief systems. As I said a couple of posts ago, "'Time, like space, exists only in relation to our experience; it is a concept linked to a perceptible change.” And so, take away conventional or clock time, and there is no space for time to exist in; take away space and there are no longer concepts that, because of time and space, exist as convention."
Thanks Om, Some thoughts and questions for you
Since the subjectivity of time is an internal reality does it also relate to experiences and their power to bring us emotionally and psychologically right back to a moment in time? Be it a found memory of a great experience, a unresolved memory of pain, or even a horrific memory of trauma when you feel as if you were right back at this moment is this subjectivity of time?
The biology of time is an interesting topic. The progression and sometimes degeneration of the brain can be a lot more powerful than one would imagine. I agree that the body prepares us in many ways for all stages of life (and stops preparing us properly when it has been psychologically affected). Take something as fundamental as puberty, fertility and menopause. I imagine that the changes in hormones have a significant impact on brain chemistry that gets lost in traditional treatment and understanding. I can go off on a tangent here (and I won’t digress too long) seems that most medical practices focus not on the patient and the inter-related complexities of their body (including their physcial brain and psychology) in treating and suppressing symptoms that are meant to be natural indicators of progression and needs as opposed to biological dysfunctions themselves. I think dementia is so complex, and the cruelest brain change of aging. I don't as much about demntia as I would like or to make solidified theories of my own;mbut I sometimes wonder why the brain seems to turn onto itself, perhaps in some cases it is protection and minimization of the dread you speak about. Dementia allows you to experience life without knowing those you love or remembering who you were or that you are in fact older and closer to death. (I apologize if these seems very generalize, this can be an entire discussion of its own.
Experiencing your own mortality through a death of someone close to you is one of the hardest lessons of life. I agree with you that as you get older the thought of death has less impact of what you perceive you will miss. You have introduced me to an interesting way to look at it as a biological change. I recall the fear and confusion around my grandfather’s death, the first death I can recall. I was 8 or 9, too young to understand my own mortality, instead I dreamt almost every night of the impeding death of those around me, my other grandparents, my parents, my aunts and uncles. I would dream of walking into a room and see them lying in a coffin and wake up afriad and to check if they were still there. As a teenager there were a couple of car accidents that killed a few of my classmates and I think this was the first time I experienced a similar realization as you explain here. I thought a lot about my own mortality and the fear associated with not only the unknown but the un-realization (I am not sure if this is even a word) of the potential of life--that if I died at this point in my life I wouldn’t be able to become the person I knew was out there somewhere and I’d loose all the pleasures in finding out who she was.
I am sorry to hear about your friend, it must have been a difficult time for you to grieve especially with the compounding realization of your own mortality. Thank you for sharing with us. A professor that I was very fond of died of brain cancer. His academic department was doing a really good job of underplaying the severity of the brain tumor he was facing. I ran into him on ‘accident’ when I was delivering dinner in the local hospital (one of the many jobs that got me through college). He didn’t remember me although I sat in his Statistics class only two days prior. He lay in ICU looking so small and frail and even afraid, but he put up a good front and joked with me, the tumor sure did not take away his true warm nature and his unbelievable smile and for that I was grateful. I visited him at home a few days later with a few other students and although he remembered them he still did not remember me. (This was difficult for me because I had a work study position in his office and felt touched by his affect on my college experience). He looked over and said, hey, why do you look so sad today? What are you going to do when you graduate? I was only a sophomore at the time and I hadn’t a clue; with tears in my eyes I said, I don’t know JB, I really don’t know, I really, really just don’t know, what it is I want to do. He thought this was particularly funny and showed me the largest smile I have ever witnessed and said, don’t worry, I still don’t know either we are all just along for the ride.
Please, tell me more about interval timing, it sounds interesting but I couldn’t find much about it online.
relatively orderly
Thanks for the mashup on time Om. But because our understanding of events is governed by the relationships among those observed (or not observed) events, it does not mean that we live in a universe of chaos. Einstein's work is predicated upon a belief (I think) that there is order if we know how to see it.
GOD DOESN'T PLAY WITH DICE, BUT HE DOES WITH NOAH. HEY ARNOLD!
So nice to hear from you. I like this phrase very much: "there is order if we know how to see it." Einstein was a true mystic I believe, and to think he saw what perhaps only three or four others in the world saw. How humbling, I could cry. And we think very few people get us! My favorite sculptor, Rodin, once said something like, "There is so much beauty, it's not that it's not there, it's only our eyes that fail to see it."
And that is the point, isn't it? There is only beauty in the nature of mind and the elegant mirror of world it reflects.
om mani padme hum
“I was sitting in a chair in the patent office ...
“I was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Bern when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me: If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight. I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me. It impelled me toward a theory of gravitation.”
HEY OUNBENNING, WHERE'S THAT SONG?
Tell us what's new in Beijing. It's been a while.
and if you feel like it
send us a photo!
The music of friends
I've been lingering but not posting much. I haven't been sure what to write so I have been soaking it all in, using everyones words to stay focus and fill my heads with thoughts (with hopes it will eventually explode and stop bothering me!) This is inspired by my friends Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, and the child-like playfulness we connect with when we get together. I'm not much of a poet so I tend to stick with a cutesy more sing-songy meter :) .
Good friends are me
when I'm swinging from a tree
pickin' lovely apricots while humming quietly
Birds are making sweet love most un-ashamedly
The Bears are reading bed time stories, snoring lazily
hazily the crickets wake, preparing special teas
The Gardener makes cake-up most apologetically
to absolve guilt associations with in-daf-fadelity
so to clear his name when they write his biography
The children scribes, young lovers carve initials in his trees
Oaks and elms do sigh and creak, clean off the graffiti
at last the badger comes to drink the dewey leaves
Winter scolds the dancing drolets til they stop to freeze
And all my friends are winter creatures come to play with me
Ah life, you scoundrel, how wonderful, when i stop to see.
Life, you scoundrel, wonderful, when I stop to see.
CARMEN, I'M READY FOR ANOTHER GHAZAL
I really love this form, particularly because of what you describe as, "Stopping at the end of the line. Completing the thought. Cherishing it, moving on." Also, "There can be no enjambment across the couplets in a strict Ghazal; each couplet must be a complete sentence (or several sentences) in itself.... Each of the couplets must be treated as a separate poem, thematically and emotionally complete in itself."
This is very powerful for me, the thought of interweaving themes and emotions finding their way to a gravitational center through the poem's totality.
This really appeals to me creatively. And your `Wanderlust' is inspiring, especially given these parameters. When I have time :) I want to work on this.
MY TIME HAD COME: WATCHING DEATH
The Sunflower's Execution
In stiff lonely autumn, the clouds sit low,
linger long like puffy pools of steel breath
falling below hard steps.
So murderous the silence before wind.
My body slept scared in the empty field,
shivered amid the brown broken bodies
calling from dark depths,
my friends rotting in the stench of decay.
I sought the early days, bursting air with bud,
when I drew close my mother's draping rays
like milk, my body soaked in thick June mud,
grew hard before the weary fields laid bare
in moon's shadows.
My thinning, frail frame desperately stalked the earth
with fingers that couldn't dig deep enough;
stalling, my time had come.
What trick was played on me that lonesome night
that I was forced to perform my own death
a thousand times before the rain would cease?
My heavy yellow head, blurred, scarred, bent, stirred
in the air, in shadows from distant light,
crawling in the black breeze
against the drone of flightless birds in night.
My time had come, light hit the morning sky.
Sunflowers
I have thought of sunflowers since reading your poem - seeing them from many summer past planted in the small garden behind the house. There were only four or five rising up all summer, opening like magic waves of friendly hands before bowing their necks to age and an early death as gluttonous squirrels broke their backs.
SUNFLOWERS MAKE WONDERFUL BIRD FEEDERS
and squirrel bowls. I had 12 garden rooms in Mattituck, including `Bird Park.' I collected many bird feeders of various sorts-- eccentric, standard, colorful-- and the squirrels always made their way up the trees to pilfer the feeders. But, there was always enough for the birds, too. Everyone was happy.
Mourning Dove
You, mourner. You, morning bird
that rouses in me the soft notes
of my sleep. You are the dove
of loss, waiting on the string
of an oak for night to fall
till you lift in the whistle
of wings.
Mockingbird
O, Whitman's mate, you have given
to me life, given to me the notes
to sing my words, the five-song
spilling, the night song calling
to she who longs the ocean
of your beak, the moon
of your tail, its white streak
the arc of sky. Sing to me
again, and I'll whisper
the words.
Yellowthroat
The Caumsett trail in Long Island
where we first met is one road
oft-taken, yet where few have been.
In the brush, you are the honeysuckle the yellow lip of light, your flute warbling from flower's tongue. Who do you call so quick
and bright, your black mask
a carnival of joy?
Song Sparrow
In the thicket and tangle of green
your long streak of tail
and brown wings stir in the breeze.
You are patient and still,
a lover in waiting.
Towhee
I used to think you were the robin
from a distance, as you scratch
through the blackberry,
your rufous side a fall leaf
your white belly the snow.
But then I call, towhee, towhee
and the woods fill with your song.
FROM THE UPANISHADS "THE SELF I ORDINARILY SEE..."
“The self that I ordinarily see,” says the aspirant, “—this is not Me; the world as it presents itself to me with its divisions and contradictions, this cannot be Real. With intellect alone, I remain outside of everything. I ask something in Nature what it is and receive as an answer only my own categories and classifications. Led from one thing to another, I do not grasp what is. `Who are you?’ – I might silently ask another, and as soon as I make a noise within myself, I fail to find the answer. Desires, needs, attachments well up within me and bind me to what I should not be.”
The Upanishads, as part of the Vedas, form a part of the Hindu scriptures. They primarily discuss philosophy, meditation, and the nature of God and form the core spiritual thought of Vedantic Hinduism. The Upanishads, also known as Vedānta, are considered the mystic strain and essence of the Vedas.
Om, I am curious
I love this quote from the Upanishads. What brought this to the forefront of your thoughts at this moment in time and space?
EMILY, YOUR TENDER BIRD FEEDER STORY
and the inspiration to experience it as a meditation brought this quote to mind. Time is a self in a bottle :) Thank you again.
Tonight
What is everyone doing tonight? What is everyone thinking and feeling? What is everyone wishing? Sometimes I wish that I could live a hundred lives at once to be here and there and slip inside someone else’s house and see what they are seeing, to hear what they are hearing. That’s why I love stories so much. I love to ease my feet into someone else’s slippers, if only for a moment. Are you in love tonight? Are you lonely? Are you dreaming?
I am in my small room. The hallway light in on but in my room the only light is the one illuminating the screen on my computer. I’d turn a lamp on, but my bird is asleep beneath the sheet that covers his cage. I am thinking about the wet laundry that I never moved to. the dryer – thinking about it, but not motivated into action. I am thinking about how moldy everything will smell if I wait much longer, which I probably will, because I am just dreaming tonight – lazy and dreaming, thinking about curling up in my bed and waiting for the cat to show up and walk her normal pattern around my feet, along my side, and onto my chest so that I can pet her.
tonight...
I am watching The Departed. It is the sort of tragedy of errors that suits my mood. There are bagpipes. I am in love and lonely. He no longer loves me. Sometimes I look at him and can feel morning stubble beneath my fingers and can't breathe.
The cat is warm on my lap, purring. A kitten just jumped on the XBox, jostling the power cord out and turning off the end credits of the movie. He will shortly knock over a pile of DVDs and then sprint into the bathroom. I am staring at a bottle of whiskey. I am not going to drink alone.
This is probably not the story that you wanted to hear, but it is the only one I can tell right now. What are you dreaming?
Carmen
I have been thinking about you often these days. I can't help but to think about my heartbreak many centuries ago when the boy I loved decided he didn't love me. I always found the idea of loving and then not loving so difficult to absorb, and the idea that someone who loves me falls out of love with me unfathomable. The pain in those times drained all happiness from me, but it is so strange that all those feelings I once had almost feel, at this distance, as someone else's story.
I feel as if I am blathering since I only want to grab your hand, take you on a long walk or a funny movie even if you don't feel like going. You wouldn't have to talk or smile or even laugh. I won't even care if you don't brush your hair or if you haven't bathed in a week. We could just bundle up, walk for hours, until we were so tired and cold that a cup of tea would seem like a brief trip to a tropical island.
Emily
Thank you.
I, too, can't understand falling out of love. The inability to talk anymore, sure, or strong ideological differences, or even that gentle understanding that it's not going to work. All those, I've been through. All those hurt and faded and twinge just the tiniest bit now, scar-tissue faint. This hurts in a whole different way, and it's a constant fight to tell myself that it's not some failing on my part, some inherent unloveable-ness. I am damn loveable! :)
I would love to share a cup of tea with you. It will have to be long-distance tea at the moment, though, for I am currently in -3 degree Wisconsin, bundled up on a chair with a kitten and a burrito, smiling at the kindness of people I have never met.
CARMEN, I JUST WANT YOU TO KNOW
that you are a ghazal! and you're not alone. Until the teaching emerges from within, in the opening of our hearts to lighter things; until the mirrors of our relationships and their cracked realities reveal those parts of ourselves that seek higher love, we must embrace the pain that will ultimately take us there. In the meantime, lean on those who care as you're figuring out how this "hurts in a whole different way." And share your burrito, tea and tears.
That Emily, she sure makes some special tea, doesn't she? And she just filled the bird feeder again. Tireless, I tell you, tireless.
Playing Clue leads to talk of politics
I have just spent the last few hours in conversation with some close friends. it feels good to talk. it feels good to be "home" --though these days I haven't been too sure of where that is anymore.
I am dreaming of dancing and I am dreaming of adventure.
today
Although it is no longer last night, I thought I would share. It is kind of grey today and I feel like Friday night has melted into just the quiet Saturday I needed. Last night I spoke to my sister on the phone for over three hours, I had to switch to my second cordless phone we spoke so long.
I lay on my bed, only half way changed. Wearing comfy jogging pants and the sweater I wore to work. As if I hadn't completely separated myself from the stresses of work and was too wiped out to take the effort to pull that layer of complexity off.
I was enjoying the time and the closeness, I was dreaming that she lived close enough for me to walk over and make a pot of tea and sit in the dark living room and just be ourselves. In the background her daughters were full of pent up energy and began to fight. A few minutes later they settled down for a movie and within the first few moments they burst out into a giggling fit. I gasp at the thought of them 20 years from now taking solace in each others voices at the end of a long week; and was grateful for our moment.
In an effort to find a way to heal and learn, to honor and support myself, and especially try to let go of judging myself I shared experiences and stories that I had never shared with her before. It was safe and welcoming and just seemed like the perfect moment to do so.
Siblings are such a special gift, you can be who you are, and share how you are feeling without having to share why--because they know you, all of you. And yet there is so much about you that they don't know and you haven't shared. Somehow that doesn't matter. There is a certain level of acceptance and understanding that you rarely get anywhere else. It is almost like they knew what you were going to say and say back, well of course you felt that way.
They have a skewed perspective of how you see yourself, the world sees you and they see you. With this perspective they can make light of the perceptions you struggle with, while still being empathetic.
I spend the morning playing brain age and doing a little bit of yoga. I decided to settle in on the couch and watch the movie, The Waitress, which reminded me of struggles I've experienced, the tenderness of others and the infinite power I hold inside. My second gift of the weekend- some great thoughts of inspiration, exactly what I needed to sit with and roll around in my mind to help me heal. And now I came to play to see how you were all doing.
I hope you get a chance to unwind and enjoy the rest of the weekend.
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