Lovers and epiphanies come and go. Leaving behind bits and peaces of experience, some to suffer, others celebrated and life goes on; with or without us--our witness. Short or long each of us, actually all life, has sufficient suffering regardless of role: predator or prey.
Pain passes and suffering lingers, the joys forgotten but then joy begins and spreads outwards towards both; their instruction in how life is lived and left.
This that writes, a mindfulness, conscious of being extruded from moment to moment moving still. Towards a goal unannounced, certainly not death. Touching, then inhabiting, eternity brings an panache to season every moment, fearlessly, with now joy versus sorrow. I do however discover myself, not suffering so much, as being with a deep concern for the course of life surrounding me. Towards which, were I so inclined, I might write fiction. To me a candy coated finger pointing, essentially, to dysfunction. My pains are forgiven and forgotten save for illustration or narrative . . . I write to save another tossed in the storms surrounding us -- swimming -- not waking on water.
Love is preemptive, law is remedial. Neither God nor nature can heal the past. More laws make more criminals; love removes both.
130106 13:00 writing - why
Ebullient when writing goes well, aggravated when not, but then can I call what do “writing”?
My reverence and joy, hymns of antiquity, today’s songs of praise I read, and heard from voices echoing on the winds. Reminds me, in view of what occurred betwixt the previous post and now -- proof positive -- of serendipity and synchronicity at work. An essential truth. My effort goes on. Affirmations, in kind and scale, beyond my wildest prayers answered.
I think myself not unique, nor special, in anyway since what I receive is available to all who seek. Add, unsought, those moments when an epiphany occurs: too good to be true, listen to your muse. . . . and take the television/radio and throw it out the window.
It is well to remember the ages and stages that must be survived until we become curious about: “Is that all there is?” in life. At the same time I forget more often than not. The physical history of our planet renders civilization, roughly, and generous at that, seven thousand years. Like the very thin membrane of onion skin. By comparison my life and concerns are but the duration of a fruit fly.
I claim no divine right of Kings or Prophets. Astonished to be alive having never thought myself able to survive beyond forty-eight-years of age. I happily remember the gift of my political interest being thwarted by The Greenwich Connecticut School System and population et al.
I cannot now recall at any time my parent’s demonstration of reverence for anything they could not buy. And oft recall dad’s, despite being honored and loved . . . he was never a father to me but more like an older brother in the sometimes benign sense . . . telling me that the ideal life was to live by the sweat of other peoples brows. Shortly thereafter I mentioned this in elementary school and the teacher, thank god, hauled me out into the hall and gave me holy hell. He had worked all his life as I did and do to gain an education.
As surely you must suspect by now, death will not end mine.
I did not cause nor can I fix the grief that happens. Save to remark that it is more typical than not and one is wise to expect more. The Muse, The All, suggest adapt, improvise and prevail . . .
- Talmud (attributed)
“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”
Be well and do the best you can
when you fail get up off your face and keep moving.
You can, you know, be the best you are.
130104 0923 affirmations
I discover myself as moving via empathy into situations way beyond my capacities. Consciously and unconsciously in thought and dreams.
Add to which I am processing massive, at least for me, amounts of information making up for feigned self indifference to education. I do crash and burn. And am dependent upon mentors. Or as I have learned, I remain an apprentice to the wisdom of those I love and trust.
I have come to trust the process of whatever it is that I undergo by experience, imagination and love. It is even for me difficult and demanding. At the same time humbling. Not humiliating . . . I lie. I take myself apart like a child's construction toy attempting to see and understand what and why I seek and the way I go.
I don’t take myself too seriously given that I am well aware of myself as an integrated system dependent upon continuance and the discontinuity of life, especially at my vintage. What I imply is an pastiche derived from desperate resources. Each in fugue. When I saw Jesus weep, he wept without grimace, eyes filling with tears.
And so it was not to long ago driving to water aerobics, the musical commentator said that J. S. Bach’s greatest fan was Mozart, something I never knew and impossible for me to imagine; then followed with a string quartet arranged by Mozart from one of Bach’s themes . . . wrecked on music. But no. I was able to control the automobile continuing on my way.
Thinking back to my first conscious mentor, a fellow journalist, who said of me that I was then, and remain now, “sullen to discipline.” In her presence I was able to laugh and cry without explanation.
I bolted from sleep conscious of a number of scenarios wherein I was witness to harm being done to others by peers. Assessing what I might do or say to forestall the incident; influence the outcome. I fear I failed the tests. It was not in distress that I awoke but in the realization that we fail because we are helpless not to. Implying that there are forces at play hugely beyond our influence; in some sense entering the victim and the predator’s state of mind. Empathy is astonishing that way.
I should know better having been utterly helpless to die instead of my son as his disease destroyed him. There was a certain grace within the experience since I am aware of parents whose children simply disappear and their fate remains forever unknowable. It is true of me that my consciousness if that of a parent informed. More profoundly so than the victim I was as a child. Add that I retain a sense of responsibility for life that I do not apply to myself making of me a fraud.
So it is that while reading Annie Dillard and Michel de Montaigne concurrently I am being cross pollinated by the sewer of violence world wide. On one hand euphoria, on the other, diving head long into a box of broken razor blades. Wafting though this is a sense, the genius of God, manifest in various prophets and saints who I sense faced the same issues personally.
I once read a contemporary Hindu’s sense of addiction as being the avoidance of God. This is a vantage point I glean from both Dillard and Montaigne sans conclusions; theirs or mine; learning to live with it. This life and time we live. . . .Ask, receive and find yourself the strength to adapt, improvise and prevail. Accepting the reality of being imperfect; failure inevitable yet it is worth the price to own yourself.
In the following sense. In failure we learn to get back up on our feet and keep on keeping on, our consciousness ever so slightly expanded and kinder to all.
In conclusion neither of my children were “mine” but their own life to live regardless short or long. Laws are remedial while love is preemptive; though dead they both live in something vaster than my mere memory.
“Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses.” - Confucius
130104 03:33 parenting
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved
