Lay your sleeping head, my love/ Human on my faithless arm" wrote Auden. I`ve been saying it like a chant. There is so much in me that is faithless, contrary, impatient. There is so often to be disappointed with. I write of these ethics, this loving, but the end of the reflection proves that passion is firmly and unsettled. I have been growing more and more resentful of AA, feeling more and more uninspired in my personal life, feeling isolated and lonely and hungry.
I feel empty and frail.
Then, as a man will, I get to rebuke even my feelings, to criticise myself for flavor and thought the way that I do. Who the hell do I suppose I am, anyway, to be bored? Why should I need `intelligent and creative` conversation when I`ve enough of people all about? Why should I begin to resent a matter that saved my spirit because I get tired of how wan and manipulative it`s people can be?
Honesty brings that.
I discover no roar of the waves, swoon in the brain, no undertow dragging me into the fecund unconscious world of laugh and creativity.
I sat in an empty storefront at 7 in the morning, watching the rain. The storefront allows me the space cheaply to teach yoga in the mornings and evenings - or at least more cheaply than trying to give my own studio or paying ridiculous rates some of the gyms and dance studios wanted. I recognise it is a good. But no one showed up, and I knew I`d be paying rent for a division that didn`t happen, and I sat and watched the rain falling. Ethics gave me the margin to do the better of it: I bought myself a latte, a luxury I usually don`t pay in to, and I pulled out a book of poems. I wrote to a friend. I tried to concentrate, but was drawn again and again to a sort of dumb looking at the rain. The gunmetal sky. The pooling water on the sidewalk. After a while, looking wasn`t enough and I left the storefront to suffer in the opened door. I required to learn it. As if I am so empty, I need world to have me.
It is virtually impossible to visualize summer when in the strongly defined black and clean and dreary world of winter. To appreciate boredom and loneliness as a piece of love, not simply it`s antithesis. But the rainfall is adequate to make me: willingness to flow on, holds me: by the time evening comes and sky pulls back to establish the moon, the long, horizontal bands of tree shadow stop me still. The stars are washed so great they seem daisies. It means nothing, now. But it will be poem, someday. They promote or breathe me forward, so that I was capable to ask myself, honestly, what it is that I require of my life.
And to answer:
exactly what I have.
But to be commensurate. To know it better.
Jung wrote `The dangerous problems in life are never fully solved. If ever they should seem to be so it is a certain sign that something has been lost. The substance and use of a problem seem to lie not in its solution but in our working at it incessantly. This alone preserves us from stultification and petrification."
I require I probably need dull and painful and empty moments in place to give to enthusiasm and creativity. It is not slow to get the balance. But I believe it is there. I must be more patient, more tolerant. But without wild dreams and ambition, it`s difficult to still get the dishes done. I`ve got to mean like a wedge to act like a merely decent human being.
They say prayer is better when it is empty. That you almost want a meeting when you resent the thing. That you take the near of bed by passing through your own angers and fears and insecurities. I know this is true. That something happens. If one looks long enough at most anything, from a rock to the skin of a tree, to the way one takes out the ice or eats an apple, the ways we love, the way it rains, something like revelation takes place. Something is given.
What ethics gives me is a saving net of luminance and time, a way of knowing shadow and light, a variety of allowance for imperfection and a willingness to fall on, anyway. It brings me more honesty: this is hard, this is what I am. And more: first this dryness, this beat and frail, and so we will go in, deeper. With the undeserved pleasure of rain, human contact, mosquito on my faithless arms.
No comments:
Post a Comment