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gurdonarkDo for others the things you lack the self-esteem to do for yourself. Imagine that you are in Rockhounders State Park, in rural New Mexico, and you hold in your hand a dull-looking spherical rock. If you held it anyplace else, you might dismiss it as a curious anomaly. But because you stand in this moment in this place in this frame of mind, you know it is really a geode. You cut it open, and inside you find crystals--amethysts so bright they would make you cry, except that you have loaned your tears out to problems you don't really have. Take the geode to a dark place with rich fluorescent light--watch the facets glitter. Drive to the top of Pinnacle Mountain, in the deep dark, when a meteor shower shoots stars down a few an hour. Just after you absorb the look of one, barely flickering past your peripheral view, close your eyes. At first you see nothing, because you have lived your life as though there is nothing to see. But then, spawned only by your imagination (your imagination), you see a flaming star, falling into the jazzlines of your deepest consciousness, and then you don't know what you know, but you know something, and you smile.
Rather than sealing blood oaths with sliced palms, blood should be preserved, permitted to course. Why sacrifice a dove, when a released dove flies? Sometimes I imagine that I am indeed a universalist--but it is not so much of bodies or soul, but only of what I imagine to be a kind of universal compassion; a compassion that cuts through the practicality I feel at five in the morning. I'd like to feel that universal sense of personal compassion for hours at a time. Perhaps that is the life everlasting. In my childhood recurrent dream, I've imagined wind so strong it carried me aloft like a kite, and yet in the back of my mind I believe somehow that I was the one in mid-air, suspended in heavy wind, floating as if I belonged, and that memory is curious to me, because it must be a memory of a dream, but the floating is just so nice.
I watched dozens of terns, hunting out things which live just below the sand. So many cycles of life and death play out all around, and yet the reality of it is all so surprising, so unexpected. Mythic immortals, literal finites.
I remember the silence. A low, inaudible hum. A hum that things had changed. A quiet realization that catastrophe had stricken. I have heard the tape of the Hindenburg disaster, and I felt all the things that announcer felt, but I remember the silence. I remember hushed tones on public radio. I remember that sense of inevitable realization. I remember television imagery. I remember burning and falling and my soul getting a hole in it, even as the excitement of the unexpected afflicted.
I read books by folks who founded faiths based on positive thinking. I am not an adherent of those faiths, nor a rejecter for that matter, but the concepts fascinate me, and delight me, and yet somehow confound me. I imagine the writer Ernest Holmes, who denied that evil exists. I know he lived during the Second World War. How did he explain the camps? Did he blame the attitudes of the afflicted? How did he deal with evil? So many times I want to read the chapters that are not written--find the ideas that nobody writes.
When I got to my hotel on Friday night, they did not have a proper room for me. They put me up instead in one of those curious rooms that hotels tend to have, with a conference table and a pull-out sofabed. They promised that I could change rooms on the next evening, but I took the whole thing as a curious metaphor. I am not born to live in luxury hotels among frighteningly wealthy people.
I am born to sleep on sofabeds, near a solid, worthy table. This is not a tale of my lack of prosperity, but of prosperity inside, a richesse entirely experiential. I'm no desert father, with my ready access to snack food and diet soda. But the worlds in which I travel are rich in different ways than the worlds of luxury automobiles and pointless consumption.
I love to close my eyes on an orange-red sunset afternoon and see the shimmering scarlet coursing as heat radiates on my eyelids. It means only what meaning I assign it. It does not change the universe. It does not even change me. I define it. It is mine to experience--or to ignore. I have savored a kiss as though it saves souls. I have taken a hike in which I marched to the center of my being. I have read a book as if it were a teleportation device. I have drunk ginger ale, and imagined it is ambrosia.
Not the having. Not the getting. Not the taking. The being. The being in this place, in this time, in this space only for an instant. This passage, this "stretch", this "in between".
I hit two home runs in Little League. Each barely cleared the fence. The best moments, though, are when the ball leaves the bat. The time before you know. Is it a fly out? Is it a triple? All you know is that you have hit the sweet of the bat, and it has connected you to something flying at high speed, and only time will tell. Only time will tell, and your heart leaps, because you are in a moment of time, and you feel it glance off your bat.
Sometimes I wonder if trying to find forgiveness for sins that don't matter merely obscures one from seeing the sins that do. Sometimes I wonder if trees could tell me things, if only I could listen. Sometimes I dream great dreams, and then have raisin bran afterwards. I see self-help books lately that speak of a Way. A Thinker's Way. An Artist's Way. But I am hunting a way in which my approach to my path is no more important than the destination.
Tomorrow I will pray.
Rather than sealing blood oaths with sliced palms, blood should be preserved, permitted to course. Why sacrifice a dove, when a released dove flies? Sometimes I imagine that I am indeed a universalist--but it is not so much of bodies or soul, but only of what I imagine to be a kind of universal compassion; a compassion that cuts through the practicality I feel at five in the morning. I'd like to feel that universal sense of personal compassion for hours at a time. Perhaps that is the life everlasting. In my childhood recurrent dream, I've imagined wind so strong it carried me aloft like a kite, and yet in the back of my mind I believe somehow that I was the one in mid-air, suspended in heavy wind, floating as if I belonged, and that memory is curious to me, because it must be a memory of a dream, but the floating is just so nice.
I watched dozens of terns, hunting out things which live just below the sand. So many cycles of life and death play out all around, and yet the reality of it is all so surprising, so unexpected. Mythic immortals, literal finites.
I remember the silence. A low, inaudible hum. A hum that things had changed. A quiet realization that catastrophe had stricken. I have heard the tape of the Hindenburg disaster, and I felt all the things that announcer felt, but I remember the silence. I remember hushed tones on public radio. I remember that sense of inevitable realization. I remember television imagery. I remember burning and falling and my soul getting a hole in it, even as the excitement of the unexpected afflicted.
I read books by folks who founded faiths based on positive thinking. I am not an adherent of those faiths, nor a rejecter for that matter, but the concepts fascinate me, and delight me, and yet somehow confound me. I imagine the writer Ernest Holmes, who denied that evil exists. I know he lived during the Second World War. How did he explain the camps? Did he blame the attitudes of the afflicted? How did he deal with evil? So many times I want to read the chapters that are not written--find the ideas that nobody writes.
When I got to my hotel on Friday night, they did not have a proper room for me. They put me up instead in one of those curious rooms that hotels tend to have, with a conference table and a pull-out sofabed. They promised that I could change rooms on the next evening, but I took the whole thing as a curious metaphor. I am not born to live in luxury hotels among frighteningly wealthy people.
I am born to sleep on sofabeds, near a solid, worthy table. This is not a tale of my lack of prosperity, but of prosperity inside, a richesse entirely experiential. I'm no desert father, with my ready access to snack food and diet soda. But the worlds in which I travel are rich in different ways than the worlds of luxury automobiles and pointless consumption.
I love to close my eyes on an orange-red sunset afternoon and see the shimmering scarlet coursing as heat radiates on my eyelids. It means only what meaning I assign it. It does not change the universe. It does not even change me. I define it. It is mine to experience--or to ignore. I have savored a kiss as though it saves souls. I have taken a hike in which I marched to the center of my being. I have read a book as if it were a teleportation device. I have drunk ginger ale, and imagined it is ambrosia.
Not the having. Not the getting. Not the taking. The being. The being in this place, in this time, in this space only for an instant. This passage, this "stretch", this "in between".
I hit two home runs in Little League. Each barely cleared the fence. The best moments, though, are when the ball leaves the bat. The time before you know. Is it a fly out? Is it a triple? All you know is that you have hit the sweet of the bat, and it has connected you to something flying at high speed, and only time will tell. Only time will tell, and your heart leaps, because you are in a moment of time, and you feel it glance off your bat.
Sometimes I wonder if trying to find forgiveness for sins that don't matter merely obscures one from seeing the sins that do. Sometimes I wonder if trees could tell me things, if only I could listen. Sometimes I dream great dreams, and then have raisin bran afterwards. I see self-help books lately that speak of a Way. A Thinker's Way. An Artist's Way. But I am hunting a way in which my approach to my path is no more important than the destination.
Tomorrow I will pray.
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Date: 2003-09-10 08:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-11 06:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-11 12:36 am (UTC):)
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Date: 2003-09-11 06:00 am (UTC)life in a straight jacket
Date: 2003-09-11 07:35 am (UTC)I think the trees could tell you something. I've been thinking of Bessie Harvey (again) lately...and her whole "trees is soul-people" notion.
And how one could live through WWII and not believe evil exists is beyond me. Evil does exist. I think it's dangerous to ignore it, to think it any less powerful than the Good. That's a problem I think I have with Christianity...the evil is too simplified, almost to the extent of being discounted. Just do steps a, b, and c and you will be saved. You can't ignore the dark. It's not that simple. (I'm really ignorant of theology, so pardon my own over-simplification.) The problem of evil is a big one.
I'm tired of the Way this the Way that. You have to find your Way, that's the only Way. Seriously. People don't want to work for anything. (Myself included, of course). The one that really gets me is that "Course in Miracles" thing-y. I don't even know what it is, but I know I want no part of it!
Sorry, to ramble, I really just wanted to say, I like your posts like this. And thank you for commenting on all my recent monstrosities.
life in a straight tin suit
Date: 2003-09-11 12:36 pm (UTC)I believe in evil, too. I think that people who disbelieve in it dislike the religious baggage, and want to see it as error to avoid the paradigm. This approach intrigues me, because so much baggage is found in the traditonal formulation. But maybe baggage is not always bad.
I find that the form of Christianity which suggests that the "right" life is the "easy" and "prosperous" life troubles me, too. It may be easy or prosperous in a "less burdened" sense, but it always seems to me that the "right" life is a life with challenges and triumphs. I am very attracted to the notion that grace is available, but not in a cheap, TV-ready version. At the same time, if it's a matter of merit only, then grace would be useless--another mercantile transaction.
I tried to go through the Course in Miracles years ago, during the curious time when the CompuServe Religion Forum Course in Miracles message board was populated with devotees not only of the course but also of a channeled being known as "Raj". They were charming people, literally charming, so I decided, without seeking a religious conversion, to "read the book". I found it quite jarring in a matter of weeks. I am a dilettante among books on religion, and could recognize a lot of root concepts. But the problem I have with everything being an illusion is that I have too many illusions already to consign everything to illusory status. The philosopher Berkeley and I might not see eye to eye, probably due to my own limitations. So the Course did not work for me, but the adherents were utterly kind, until some internal shakeup at the forum drove them from the forum. As I recall, the CIM folks did not want a non-standard CIM group using the name, but I did not understand the nuances of the issue.
I saw Marianne Williamson on PBS the other day, doing one of those inspirational things they play at fund-raisers. In my mind, she always represented that glib, "commercial" face of spirituality, although I did love that thing where they used to call her the "bitch for God" due to her iconoclastic nature and I know many people drew great inspiration from her. She had always seemed a bit too "have your cake and eat it, too" to me (God! Unlimited hedonism! Love! Flashy temper! Riches! You can Have it All!).To my surprise, though, she was an entirely enchanting speaker, and she had a great deal to say I found insightful. What I dislike about many positive thinking and new age faiths is that they can ignore Truth in pursuit of the idea that Truth is always positive, but she actually seemed entirely thoughtful. So maybe I am redeemed from being a curmudgeon. I always hate to attack other folks' beliefs, anyway, so long as they are peaceful and caring.
Well, now I'm rambling! Thanks for commenting!