Although nearly silent, or, too busy to conjure and compose, or…
I have not given up, having not ceased,
somewhere in the mix of these,
somewhere between voices…
Tag: being
To 2015, then
“Great changes in life are always a help…”
-Fyodor Dostoevsky-
A STEP AT A TIME
Now one eye daylight
and one not
there was a lifetime
before they flew
their true colors
but I must have known
the moment I was born
the pans of the balance
swinging along with me
always two poles
with the seasons rocking
between them
.
and the familiar the unexplored
the city the country
abroad almost at home
and home never quite there
just the way it was before
.
left foot right foot
on the same way
my own way
of finding and losing
and in my own time
coming to one
love one place
day and night
as they came to me
.
but the knowing and the rain
the dream and the morning
the wind the pain
the love the burning
.
it seems you must let them come
so you can let them go
you must let them go
so you let them come
– W. S. Merwin
For (every?) New Year
Greetings all. I realize something now. I realize (today), I realize, sitting in the sun of a Winter in Kansas, on my porch, in a rocker, alone, a side-effect, a remnant, remainder, myself… I realize that I have long dreamt of leaving some legacy, of making some mark, of contributing to the world – the natural world – the world as made up of plants, animals, landscapes, elements, humans… the world dizzied with combinations of atoms and molecules… and yet… and yet… I realize it was all about love – all about being realized by being loved, and realizing meaning in loving – NOT leaving a literary legacy, NOT producing interesting and intriguing offspring, NOT making art or language or objects that would outlast me – NO, no, no… Simply recognizing that I exist, existed, am existing in the world of another, and that the world exists, existed, will exist for me – by my affection and attention to its nuances, details, and differences – its specificity of my attention, attraction and resolve: LOVE.
I found this entry in an old journal, a blue oversized Moleskine soft-covered journal, and found (years later) that it still seemed to speak for me… but as I typed and edited it I realized that it has been outdone, realized, accomplished, in the FACT of BEING LOVED and BEING ENABLED TO LOVE… and so all the hopes remain, all the purposes and visions, all the projected communications and connections… but in a context rearranged, reapportioned, reinvented – that of MEANING derived from LOVING and being LOVED. Thanks to my vibrant partner and accomplice, inspiration and reward – for taking the grave gravity of production and transforming it into action… the pinched acuity of competition and accomplishment into offshoot, accumulation and extraneous luxury – that the hopes, dreams and ideas / ideals of a human existence might be translated into freedom, grace, and potential benefit or gift – possibility rather than necessity; offering rather than identity; potentiality rather than desperation – a giving in distinction from a grasping : so I might still possess similar hoping without the fear and trembling, without a sense of pointlessness, without a perception of failure. LOVING – intricate maneuvers of helping and healing, intimate operations of interaction and reciprocation, finely detailed activities of acceptance and reception – the sigh, the breath, the pulse of BEING… change me. Change and change and change me. As a parent, a man, a partner, a person. Thank you dear love – a wonder, a woman, an incredible human – a person: full and becoming, so generous, so tender, so affirmative and kind, so rich and creative, inventive and becoming, so new – I love you. The world is different now. Its meaning, its point, its aim, its occasion.
This old and rediscovered writing has distinct meaning… because you, and life, and love, and… an evolving and differentiated “I.”
I am using the blue notebook with a blue pen to complement. Why? Because you asked. You said “everyone wants to know.”
In other words, if it’s going to count for what matters, it has got to be specific and special – set apart, somehow more final, more complete. I’ll use it for the whole – for photos, drawings and more – all the blue notebook in blue ink – for you. Because apparently, “everyone wants to know.”
Mom and dad ask in their roundabout, passive-regressive surreptitiously accusatory way, as is their fashion – kindly and quiet, ever with a look of care and concern, yet secretly shouting their “what is wrong with you!?” “What is wrong with US, that you…” and on and on and blah blah blah…
My memory isn’t like that the first five years of life…that I pretend to remember. But all is mostly smells and sounds and light from there. Trees and grass and dirt, how brightness gleamed and glanced and filtered through, with times of wind and rain.
Not that you care… I’m fairly certain that’s not what is being asked for, not by you, by my sibling, children, or lifetime of “friends” and “family” – whoever, wherever they’ve become.
You’re the livewire – and perhaps the children – perhaps they will want to know, at some point, perhaps not. Perhaps everyone’s already figured my story – diagnosed and prescribed me. Perhaps.
Be that as it may, I’ve thought long and hard, reviewing what I thought I knew, how I felt I felt, what it seems I’ve seen, and so on, and decided, for you, for you, really, and maybe a little of a bit for myself (curiously) and a percentage for my kids should they ever seek to know or wonder, or have need of psychological freedom, or give a shit about who or why… I decided to use this damned blue notebook with matching pen and try to learn just what I think about it all, mostly because, as you put it, “everyone wants to know” – (and WHO might this “everyone” be?).
Should I start with the hands, the head, or the heart? I suppose the limbs and loins will come into play as well – god knows the guts and the goiter.
I remember an opening. A time I was touched, in the rain, and my suddenly skin, my obvious self-enclosure – as opening, margin, and veil – a fabric of me, and a screen.
I wanted to make a difference, you see. Make something, I don’t know, construct an element everyone could hold on to. Take in hand, heart and head. Keep or repeat as needed. Something like that. I knew I wouldn’t last, none of this, none of anything. “The center cannot hold” sort of deal.
I ought not begin there. They’re all wound up together like knots – the head looking down, arms wrapped around, concealing and revealing the heart, the guts, the loins and moving limbs. I can’t take a one without other, thinking and feeling about it, my actions, ideas, and sensations all.
Perhaps I’ll pretend. (Just what you’ve all loved so well about me – to discover pretense – how I’ve molded myself to imagined desires). I’ll pretend I’m an aged man seated on a stiff wooden chair, children / grandchildren gathered all about me – a specimen or model – something to be taken apart and examined. I lift off my shirt and my body is read – questions asked – we all get somewhere in this way.
Let’s see – here – along the shoulder – a self-portrait by Egon Schiele (self-tormented asylum brother) and a snake that is eating its tail. “Le Ouroborous,” I hack out – “don’t you know it?” Sign of doctors, ingenuity, medicine and art – creation, destruction intertwined round and round. Self-devouring while birthing its form as it alters. The mastication and regurgitation of “I.”
A young one might say “what’s that? – the curlicues and elaborate spiel?” Garcia Lorca I’d sigh. Yes. The grand leaping bugger of light. He’s yellow and lemons, crickets and birds! You know the stuff that sends you! Portal moments of sight or song and ‘wham!’ all the crap pelted into your brain and body get shaken and stirred together like surrealist still life. Incongruity making sense. Opposites attracting, no, better – look at your aging mother and I – a juxtaposed spectrum, paradox and carnival!
They say that you wanted to know.
Yes there’s Kafka, Blanchot, Cixous and Lispector. Jabes and Beckett now seeped in my veins. Dostoevsky, Bakhtin, Rilke. Gods and angels, drink and demons all carved in the skin of their names. Nietzsche and ridiculous happiness. Wittgenstein and the torment of words, of meanings, of none. I’d be a working inscription, at surface.
The corridors – head, heart and hands.
Are you sure anyone wanted to know?
The sounds of piano? Coaxing the keys in steady patterns – mimicking rain; or poems – yes, we forget Giacometti’s “Man Falling” – a perpetual stumble on the back of my hand, hoping neither knew what the other was up to. But they did and they do – I see that now – all parts of same body, stretched with same skin. Poems as stripped-down sculptures, some essential chants or song – just a gaze or a wisp of caress. Droppings of blood. Miracles that something remains after we’re through with our twisting and grasping.
Is this what you wanted? Does it explain – anything? I doubt it. Hardly think so.
Read on.
Here at the ribs. The cracked and the lumpen. There was a time. Times I thought maybe risking and danger – a reach at euphoria – some panicking life – might make one feel much more alive. How do you think you all got here? Desperate plungings into the unknown, oh dear ones, like mad scientists messing around in the lab! The edges of cliffs, clinging to limbs, insecure at wits’ ends, going for broke.
And break we did.
But just look at you fertile seedlings, good eggs. I never meant to be rough with you all. To risk what is fragile in you. Ribs, here – cave and cage for the heart.
I can still breathe you. Charred and chortled, this was one great pleasure – to know I was breathing, in-spired. I know you all despised it, and it caused me to smell stale and rotting, but the rush of smoke down this pipe here into the bellows of slimy flesh…that let me know I was taking it in, not an automaton or senseless machine – no, I was hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling – BEING – I could feel it in my ashen lungs. Sometimes it hurt. What we ingest. But it really goes in and visibly comes out – everything – for good or ill. I needed to know it tangibly.
Why? you ask, why?
Look at the cranium stooped and weighed down. That sucker was a burden of liquid fire. All curled over like that the entirety of my life – looking in, at, in. What’s there? How does it work? For “whom”? When? Is there even a why? Examining, dreaming, recording and imagining – listen – say it back, say it forth, combine and copulate, shake it and stir – use that heavy weight, whirr whirr chrrr and whirr. Profile the shape of some jagged question mark, dotted where the heart must be.
And look at it now, nearly buried into the chest. It happens. Weather-systems, signsponge, it all will run its course. It once was aimed upwards and outwards, into fantasies, hopes and abstractions, and for years I kept it aimed straight ahead – horizontal, seeking directions – but slowly and surely its drug down toward the heart, pulsing muscle, plug for the cords. Everything up and away, everything out there or behind, it’s all happening here – in the mix, filtering through, circulating the circuitry of head, heart and hands – latching up or breaking down in the system.
What was it you wanted to know? Limbs and loins, head and heart, I’m acknowledging and exposing, affording view – I’m aware description does not explain a thing – the wonderful views of science still unable to explain…
The waste gets processed below, legs running away now knobby and stiff. But there, clinging in its corner like a core – my erratic, agitated, beating beast. Entire web of inexplicable drives and energy, fears and misery, desires and dread – my heart. Does this explain it? Does this explain anything? What anyone wanted to know?
Gasping there like the mouth of a landed fish, pulsing purplish like an aroused member – my heart. If I poke and coax it, tear at it or wring it onto this blue notebook in blued blood – will it explain?
Here, whomever, look. Here it lies, cheats, and steals. Here it gives and it aches and breaks. Here it prolongs and stops itself short. Pulpy mass of living meat – humana – the am therefore am. Take it, read it, test it – heal it if you wish or can. I’m open.
Is this what you wanted?
What everyone wanted to know?
The Holidays
Within this 3-week, no, 2-month, no, now nearly half-year era
misnomered “the Holy Days” –
I want everything –
.
to come due later,
in January,
in what’s new,
to BE new
and newly different.
.
For now –
to simply endure,
and that – blithely.
For there to be lights and laughter
and a certain sort of gladness.
Not this anxiety, this stress,
this hurry-up and choosing.
.
What is “holy” of these days
must be a kind of wanting.
Beings filled of wish
and momentary joys.
We list them:
I want …….
and I am thankful for …..
.
Hooray! – these days are holy!
I get to say and give and get …
wantonly.
Wantingly.
.
We ache.
.
And it begins again.
And so, the story, such as it is
We start. We start out. We dance into a light. We are seen. We have become. We are embodied.
This is how it begins for us. We are noticed as a being, as a living, as living beings. Addressed.
Some one, some thing, is aware of “us.” We become. Something. Someone.
I am born. I have…”be-come.” And that, a result…a result, resolution, resolublution, happenstance, happening of cum. Plus. Cum (sperm, spermatazoa, DNA transport system) PLUS egg (potentia, potentiality, amorphous stew – DNA resourcing, inchoate, unpredictable, predictable)
CUM + EGG = possibility
A be-cumming. A chance, a shot, a gumbo – ME.
And then I AM.
And that “I am” is a simply recognition, a simply acknowledging, acknowledgment, an awareness, a “noticing” – a THAT – THERE IS – a “There is: That.”
A “Nathan.”
A nothing be-cums (in collusion with egg) a “Nathan” – named, cognized, acknowledged, noticed and noted: Nathan is NOT a Nothing, but is a Some Thing… a “Being,” a “human,” a “boy,” a “creature,” even…a “Person.”
And I become. We. Become. A combination of things cognizable in individuality and commerce. A singularity in multiplicity…
THIS combination of possibilities = Nathan
= THIS one
= ??????
this ITEM is accounted, is sensed, perceived, listed, catalogued – BECOME.
And so, we start out. Cells of a particular way. Become. Noted, recognized, be-come, be-came, be-CAUSEd. IT. THIS. YOU. (ME).
Held. Cooed. Coddled. Nursed. Murmured and whispered as an “I,” a “You,” an “It,” a “They,” an “A,” a “Him.”
I am a Definite Article.
A/The Some Thing. Being. Organism. Combinatory intricate systemic reality object of cellular operations – genetic, bio-logical(?), “existent,” “happening/happenstance,” as… THIS ONE, THING, REALITY.
And so, we begin.
I try to go back there. To the beginning, that initial “noticing.” (“Honey, I think I might be pregnant”). Effect. A. The. This one. Son. Boy. He. It. Him. Here: a coagulation of cells.
Biology. Psychology. Chemistry. Anthropology. Philosophy. Science. Metaphysics.
“I” began. By being accounted for. Taken note of. Recognized. Attached or detached from. Signaled, symbolized, named and noted.
Here comes a new “One.” (that is, Many). – A “Person.” Awkward, precedented (unprecedented) amalgam equaling a “You” “It” “He/She” “Being” “Person” “Human” “Child.”
NAMED (accounted for and acknowledged, reported AS…)
“Nathan Wayne Filbert”
A-ha! So – this one! That, right there…different from and the same as this other kind…
An observable being, a kind of individual sample, remarkable and marked down, documented, evidential data…A, The, It, An…
Here begins a definite article.
An individual.
An example.
Sample.
Kind.
Type.
Organism.
Characteristic.
Assortment.
Collusion.
Combination.
Instance of.
SOME THING.
And life goes on.
Happens.
Takes shape.
Becomes.
Invents.
Occurs.
Adapts.
Results.
Resolves.
again…again…again…
Here rises/lies Nathan Wayne Filbert,
named and acknowledged,
become, begun, existent,
(such as it is)
(from time to time)
ahem
cough, cough
(occasionally)
grrrrr
Hello.
The Costume
The Costume
When there is dialogue, or perception. When he’s awake. But what to name it? How describe? Perhaps even while sleeping.
The lag.
At checkout counter, clerk addresses: to absorption, numbness, mumble. Other.
Strikes Alfonse as he’s driving toward home: there are trees bending, being present in their way. Cars, pedestrians, small animals scurrying. A school bus. Neighborhoods – definite yards and homes. A mail-delivery-person. A filmy mist. A fall-behind in his perception. Gap. Perhaps.
He initially considered it a veil. A tremulous fog. A curious “vagueness to things.” Like long, cold Winter. Haphazard inceptions: tree, bus, children; cat, dog, car. No attachment. A muffling and delay. A foreigner. Driver inside steel mechanism, separate by seconds, very nearly removed – a skein, a skin, a veil. An organism with apparatus. The slow calculator.
The smeary light when she speaks: lover, mother, friend. Overlaps, palimpsests, a smudging feedback, a decay. The children crying. Vocalization evokes. Indicates. Needs. Response. Remembers he is human. Particular understandings, expectations. Affirmations and acknowledgments. Times for saying yes. Attentional assent.
Alfonse disbursed. Pernicious regress. As if he’d be immediate. As if the others were. As if it all were touching, interspersed and in exchange. This thing and another. He is embodied. The body seems slow, or surprisingly fast, almost anticipatory (unbeckoned, unmeditated erections). He can’t make sense from it. Body makes sense he knows not of. Who knows not of? Of what? Even how might be accurate here. Alfonse cannot seem to know, this is his costume, a glassy shroud, the sluggishness between the here and now. Without a zipper or a tag.
Inside a bottle within distorted frame, but without an image described so clearly. Costumes are alive – expose the motions of the wearer. Notions. Reveal, conceal, but variant things. Who dressed him this occasion? This dismantled undoing and random erasure, perpetual hiatuses of interpretation? His hesitant reality – a retardation, sensational slag, both slow-soaking sponge and absorbency-abdicator.
“I got nothing,” he murmurs, “didn’t catch a word you said…” as if in some other language of different rhythm and tune. Not understood. Multiple things unrelated, cannot tell, cannot smell, is uncertain where he is in his motions. Not quick enough, just out of joint, who what where why when never equals now for him, nor how. He is Alfonse and he seems costumed.
Making love – a metaphor for intimacy – those direct invasive actions – and yet he’s steps away, slow to the uptake, uncertain who is doing where and when. That comes later and looks like smudges that he estimates with guessing.
Is this uncommon? – is what he wonders. Am I the only one who cannot tell? Does she know what she is doing, feeling it as it happens? He’s asking something far away he cannot measure. He wakes each morning, to himself, inside this costume, and dons the heavy cloak of it for sleep. Asynchronous, distant, accidental and traumatic, but postponed – perpetual flush of shut-down, shock, bewilder.
He thinks “flamingo” inside a jar of unfocused space in alternate materials in artificial frame and anesthetic wall in analagesic scheme, so far, far, far, far… the clock is slipping. The span from here from now, from him from there, from this to happening, happens.
And so it goes. Costume he can’t remember wearing that encases and engulfs. Awareness too long after to affect. A lostness in the makeup or makeover, the becoming and become. Too late. Ineffective. Ever after and begone.
Echoes. Surely something must be said, something addressed to him, something interjected, interacted and applied – only ever now arriving quite beyond a sensibility toward response – apposite, inappropriate, out of line and time and sense. Unsettled and uncouth. A threatening out-of-sorts, off-color and unfelt. Feeling suffocated, unrelating.
Alfonse swimming being, non-concurrent, unawares. Ineffably indistinct. Imperceptibly misinterpreted. Not. Never. Was. But. Here. Where. No. Not. Now. It slides away. He heard something (her mouth, lips, the child-in-walkway, bird, tree bent to breeze) – no, not yet, before, never always, when? How?
Soughing in a muddy river, ice overhead shifting, yesterday. Forever. There is no today in the mix, the undertow, a disconnected untoward, who where when – not he – can’t remember, a caesura of consequence – plugging, plunging him far from present, dark and drear.
So far between the now and when – not-knowing.
Invisible costume. Alfonse’s weight. Indistinguishably unable – uncommonly common, this viscous opaque coating – no known axis or location – simply not. Not. Not.
Knots of not…not-knowing, not-quite-hearing, not-feeling, not-tasting, ever too late. Undone for undoing.
Alfonse within costume, a muzzling muffle of indigestive guzzle, of life. A weather and reprove, a restrictive deconstruction, a not-quite-absence in the presence of the everywhereabouts and everywhen of… of… everything.
Scripture : Roots
“In the beginning was the word…”
“…and the word was god.”
Enigma.
My youth was spent immersed in a form of neo-fundamentalist, conservative, evangelical Christianity. It would be difficult for me to estimate the number of bible readings, passages memorized, commentaries consumed, and sermons received during my first twenty-some years of life.
Twenty-some years later, libraries of world literature later, this particular phrase, passage, verbal construction remains like a haunting, a rule, a resonance and reverberation of the deepest sort – a kind of First Sentence that rises and echoes in me whenever I turn myself to writing. A statement some whole of me attached to in presumptive belief and passion that constitutes, in its way, the work of my adult life.
In what “beginning” was the word? And what was that word, are we to read this word as, literally, “god”? Or are words themselves divine, godlike in their creativity and actionable functions? In the full passage we read that the word is both “with” god and itself god…a quintessential meta-statement from whatever interpretive stance one selects.
“In the beginning was the word [in beginnings words become? In words become beginnings?],
and the word was with god [words that are with] and the word was god [words that are].”
Religiously: when humans spoke “god,” gods became. Conception creating realities. Referentiality – a term is attached to an object, idea, relation…and the object, idea, relation begins to become that term (and vice-versa, through public practice).
Words epitomize co-creation, collusion. I am a tiny human organism, an infant birthed into a community of persons. This community attaches a term to me: “Nathan.” I grow into that name, define and fill it with characteristics, behaviors, activities, experiences…and, for my communities (the others I relate to) that word “Nathan” comes to mean my specific organism in the world.
Words are beginnings, are like relational diagrams, invisible cross-hatchings and webbing throughout lived experience as humans – inceptions of internal and external possibilities and limitations via their activity as connective linkages, as references and realities. Every term is metaphor – symbol, signal, object – requiring its interpretant. The multi-sided act: language.
So what began with language? Language that joins with and is?
I suggest meaning. Conscious participation, co-mmunication, reflective relating.
Religiously: posit Supreme Being and it posits world. Speak reality and reality speaks. All a matter of relating, relation…communication…language.
World becomes via collaboration, interaction – made possible through efforts of mutuality and distinction: gestures, intelligible utterances, multilogues, dialogues – communication.
Possible interpretation: A god languages “god” into being. “Unicorn,” “fairy,” “truth,” “quark,” “molecule,” “consciousness,” – invisible, imperceptible “realities” language (WITH) and then become (ARE). Subsequently the commerce and exchange of the universe alters…
Each utterance brings new relations and thereby new “things/realities” into concourse.
I can believe that what begins in language (or, communication/relation/collusion) is MEANING (such a word as “god” itself).
I find, trundling through countless notebooks, pages, typescripts, letters and journals, that at the head of any larger work or endeavor I attempt is inscribed this personally indelible takeaway from my youth’s indoctrination:
In the beginning is the word
a thing that creates in being constructed
always co-constructed WITH something else/Other
and becoming something else/Other in its utterance and collusion
organism + environment = meaning
all reality resides in relation
all of these also words, beginnings, possibilities
In beginnings are words
and in words begins begins begins
ever forging relations into realities into relations
tying things one to another to another to another
in concourse
en route as route
Revisiting “I”-dentity
“I”-dentity: and/or “I” is a product of the Other and the Us
I wouldn’t know how to tell you my story, though life knows I try and have tried (as if someone cared).
What is it to you? And “I”? Is “we”? When the parts are estranged, differentiated – unknown and uncertain? If the question of being is YouMe + We?
My approach to myself as an Other and Us.
Thinking in time with the seasons – their perceptible growth and decay. Their relations.
For all the world in the sheer ice of January the wheat crop is dead… but it rises late in the Spring.
The drizzling, chill fog is burned off by the Summer.
I succumb to grief, and then joy, but grief will come again (and then joy…and then grief… and then)…
Fall and its gradual dying: discoloration, departure. What we experience as lengthening quiet.
I thought it was over (this “I”), again and again. But it always turns out it is ready to bloom and express, given certain conditions (the “I” and what blooms, as well as conditions – differing every time).
Not quite fallow – apparently. The seeds and resources are there (that’s the HUMAN) – called out by consortial action.
So “I” is the product of the Other and the Us. Always more than one and all their relations. Sea, land and sky, our cells and their content-rich contexts.
I’ve been abandoned and resumed without loss each mysterious gain. I’ve betrayed and discovered new friends. We don’t remember where to categorize pain: is it “bad” is it “good” – but then simply it is just like we and the other and the us.
“I” dent. I am in-formed while in-forming. When I move, lie or make, I am changed.
It’s not fault of an-other, an outside, an “external,” nor “me” in my body, my space and my time, but the “we” is the cause – the “us” in relation: all is com-pound, com-plex, and co-herent (“co-here-in-it”?). Here together we change and are changed. And thus love.
And our fear. And we forecast by memory.
“I” am not “I” as “I” was. Nor like the “I” “I” will be. Which “I” cannot predict for all its co-dependence. Which we labeled “dis-ease” and no wonder – it makes us uneasy being out of control.
Yet we’re only an “I” in a context. A context of other and us.
When the “other”s keep changing (be coyote or mountain, NY or SF, literature, germ, snail or partner) the “I” also shifts and adapts, becomes “else,” becomes novel, strikes a balance with all that is “us.”
So give credit where credit is due (or a “cause”): whatever your “I” equals a me + a you – and is describable in manifold ways – as a god or the weather, a child or a feather, and is probably always ALL AND.
So no “OR.” Choice is an additive move.
TV news brought us the phrase “and now this.” Exponentialed via World-Wide-Web, and most probably true (or maybe it’s real). Connections incalculable, meshwork beyond comprehension, impossible untangling deciphers…now this and now this and now this = “I” (and “you” and “us” and “we” and “world”).
Terms are confusing.
We Are. Con-fused beyond knowing.
There is no other way (then/than) To Be.
“I” as a product of Other and Us.
SWARM: “Fly on… right through” … or, “Differentiation + Linkage = Integration”
To write beautiful.
I knew where I was, momentarily.
The paradox: making awareness an habit.
By definition a habit, meditative or otherwise, becomes somewhat “automatic” and therefore something other than “awareness” or novel or differentiated… and yet…
Taking in the good… being lived…
“Implicitly, and more fundamentally, this practice means a relaxed opening into the love – in a very very broad sense – that is the actual nature of everything. Moment by moment, the world and the mind reliably carry you along. This isn’t airy-fairy, it’s real. Our physical selves are woven in the tapestry of materiality, whose particles and energies never fail. The supplies – the light and air, the furniture and flowers – that are present this instant are here, available, whatever the future may hold. So too is the caring and goodwill that others have for you, and the momentum of your own accomplishments, and the healthy workings of your body. Meanwhile, your mind goes on being, while dependably weaving this thought, this sound, this moment of consciousness.
It’s hard to sustain a felt knowing of this nature of everything. The brain evolved to keep our ancestors afraid to keep them alive. But if you look, and look again, you can see directly that right now, and in every now you’re alive, you’re cradled by the world and the mind like a child carried to bed by her mother. This cradling is a kind of love, and when you trust it enough to soften and fall back into it, there’s an untangling of the knots of fear and separation. Then comes both an undoing of the craving that drives suffering and harm, and a freeing and fueling love living through you and as you out into the world.
Imagine a single day in which you were often – not continuously, not perfectly – lived by love. When I try this myself, the events of the day don’t change much -but my experience of them, and their effects, improve dramatically. Consider this as a practice for a day, a week – or the year altogether.
More widely, imagine a world in which many people, enough people – known and unknown, the low and the mighty – were lived by love. As our world teeters on the edge of a sword – and could tip either into realistic prosperity, justice, and peace, or into growing resource wars, despotism, or fundamentalism – it seems to me that it’s not just possible for a critical mass of human hearts to be lived by love. It’s necessary.
How?
The essence of this practice is a yielding into all that lives you. This is a paradigm shift from the typical top-down, subtly contracted, moving-out-from-a-unified-center-of-view-and-action way of operating . . . to a relaxed receptive abiding, feeling supported by the ocean of causes creating each momentary wave of awareness. Then on this basis, there is an encouraging of love in all its forms to flow through you. The suggestions that follow are different ways to do this, and you can also find your own.
Soften and open in the heart. Notice that you are alright right now: listen to your body telling your brain that you are basically OK. Feel the fullness that is already here, all the perceptions and thoughts and feelings pop-pop-popping in this moment of consciousness. Feel the buoying currents of nature and life, waves of gifts from over 3 billion years of evolution on our blue and green pebble. Look around and see objects, including your own hands and body, and consider the unfailing generosity of the material realm, blossoming for over 12 billion years from a seed of light.
Be aware of the warmth and good will from others toward you. Sense your connecting to others, how you are supported by a net of relationships. They don’t have to be perfect. Some people do care about you. You are almost certainly loved.
Feel carried by consciousness, the effortless knowing of perception and thought. When stress, worry, pressure, or pain appear in the mind, see that the fabric of this suffering – the underlying operating of the mind – is itself fine, is always already fine.
Again and again making this little but profound shift, this giving over to the carrying cradling of mind and matter, you can afford to let your own love flow freely. Bring this down to earth: if you lived from love in your first encounter with another person today, how would you be, what would you do, how would you speak? What would a week, a year, be like in which you lived by love? How about trying this? Who knows, if enough people share in this practice, the world could become a much better place.”
– Rick Hanson, Just One Thing-
Differentiation
Linkage
Integration
Difference
Similarities
Meaning
Perception
Mayhem. Chaos. Disregulation. Con-fusion.
Brokenness. Openness. Wounds. Seeping.
Connecting. Contaminating. Communicating. Constructing.
In other words: fly on… ride through. Take note, make it a habit to take note. Attend, automatically attend. Love, freely, openly, love.
PARTICIPATE.
There is so very much good happening. Arriving, passing through, departing… HAPPENING.
Don’t forget. Don’t ignore.
Beauty. Hands. Hair. Voices. Language. Gestures. Meanings.
the PROCESS.
ENJOY. DELIGHT. LAUGH. NOTICE.
Fly on.
Ride through.
Notice (differentiate, conceive, perceive, attend)
Link (conjoin, participate, connect, find similarity, solidarity)
Integrate (make meaning, story, intention, purpose, gratitude)
Novelty Similacrum Meaning
I have felt overwhelmed by meanings. Flooded with good. Surprised by kindness. Taken off guard (guards unnecessary) by humans. How much good there is — children discovering, struggling; coyotes chasing cars; peacocks squawking; handshakes and smiles; innovations and ideas; hopes and dreams; sounds and shapes; disappointments and losses; grief and gratitude; desire and refusal; romance and death…
BEING LIVED
a body materially exchanging, interacting, interoperating with all the materials that surround it
a consciousness, awareness alert to emotion, interpretation, possibilities and limitations
a being responsive to other being
LIVING
in the midst of
and with
alongside
and because of
interacting
exploring
interpreting
engaging
SWARMING
existence
BEING LIVED
-all images – Lukas Felzmann, Swarm; music – Coldplay, Ghost Stories
To be continued…
“Yet if language gives no words for what happens…it nevertheless gives itself”
-Christopher Fynsk-
“Communication is the awareness of a chain of meaning of which every speaker and interpreter is part”
-Renate Lachmann-
“Two voices is the minimum for life, the minimum for existence”
-Mikhail Bakhtin-
All my Words are Silent 