“We are probably wrong to suspect that each individual has some secret passion, some mystery, some weakness; if Jean-Yves’s father had had to express his innermost convictions, the profound meaning he ascribed to life, he could probably have cited nothing more than a slight disappointment.”
“I continued to wonder what exactly I had done to deserve a woman like Valerie. Nothing, probably. I observe the world as it unfurls, I thought; proceeding empirically, in good faith, I observe it; I can do no more than observe.”
I have had such a hard time feeling any enthusiasm about much in my life since Berta’s sudden departure. All the people connected with her have faded away from me over the last year. It almost feels as if the whole relationship were a distraction in a long period of struggling to find something more than getting through another day. It is so hard to figure out how we got together in the first place and how she attracted my attention and held it long enough for me to get to know her enough to invest more than empathy in her situation. The Berta who loved me was not the mother that raised 4 children while living through a marriage with a man who abused and neglected everyone in his life. She had not worked for many years and had been homeless and abandoned by everyone she called family. At some point I showed her enough of who I am that she knew that I would take care of her. I don’t know how she knew that especially since I held her at a distance for so long while I made sure she was cared for. Finally, she made it clear that I was her choice, and I had to choose her.
Now I am back at that point where I am trying to figure out how to move on with my life with some kind of deeper commitment to anyone. I am starting to go through some motions of reconnecting with family, my grown-up children, my siblings, and my mother, after these last few years of disconnection and dissociation and the final separation of death. I can’t really think about any of this clearly anymore so I will let Jackson Browne illustrate some of the feelings involved. I am too tired and it is so late and tomorrow is another day of trying to figure out what I am doing here. I have come back to this album so many times in my life and now I find it resonating again and helping me move forward.
Leibniz really was right. We’re all points of view or windows on the universe. Or as Deleuze puts it, we’re possible worlds. The tragedy is we think we’re just seeing the universe, encountering it and other people as they are, and are seldom able to discern the window frame through which we encounter the universe. A person encounters everyone about them as jerks and assholes, and it doesn’t occur to them to wonder whether they might be the asshole. One of the greatest challenges is to see how we see…. A sort of singular transcendentalism. Here I think of the terrifying film Occulus. I’ve never been able to rewatch it because the people are so trapped in their private hell, there’s no escape.
Nature is full of teeth that come in one by one, then decay, fall out. In nature nothing is stable, all is change, bears, dogs, peas, the willow, all disappear. Only to be reborn. Rocks crumble, make new forms, oceans move the continents, mountains rise up and down like ghosts yet all is natural, all is change.
As I write this sentence about one hundred and four generations since Christ, nothing has changed except knowledge, the test tubes. Man still falls into the dirt and is covered. As I write this sentence one thousand are going and one thousand are coming. It is like the well that never dries up. It is like the sea which is the kitchen of God.
We are all earthworms, digging our wrinkles. We live beneath the ground and if Christ should come in the form of a plow and dig a furrow and push us up into the day we earthworms would be blinded by the sudden light and writhe in our distress. As I write this sentence I too writhe.
For all you who are going, and there are many who are climbing their pain, many who will bepainted out with a black ink suddenly and before it is time, for these many I say, awkwardly, clumsily, take off your life like trousers, your shoes, your underwear, then take off your flesh, unpick the lock of your bones. In other words take off the wall that separates you from God.
Today after a long day of working with older, injured adults some recovering and some on their way out of a long life, I am satisfied to let my body relax and just be with my mind at rest, but still aware that each and every moment the world in me and around me is in flux, altering life around me and in me in uncountable ways. At this moment I am alright with that. I can let the world change me and all that is connected to me and know that it will all drift in ways I can’t control. I can teach people to use their changing bodies with more efficient, safe, and pain-free movements and how to use devices so they can continue to be mobile, but I will never control the ultimate outcomes mine or theirs. Eventually, we all come to a point where we no longer move through the world, but we will always move with the world and all that is contained in the world and in us. That is inescapable. We will all always be connected to each other and all that is in the world, moving and transforming, separating and combining in infinite ways.
It is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
Virginia Woolf
I continue to search for deep connections within the world that contains all of us, to decrease the false separations that I have created as my persona, the idea that there is an isolated self that must survive in order to have meaning. The only meaning my life in this body needs to have is that I live as an integral part of the world as whole, making everyone’s existence in the world more integrated and free from suffering as I am capable of doing. I am still working out my path to relieving and reducing my sense of entitlement to material possessions and safety. There is no actual security or continuity in life except that which is enforced at a cost to others or an increased feeling of isolation and alienation from my true place in the world.
The pursuit of greater confusion by de(con)struction of the individual (gender, sexuality, professional and family function, education, culture, history …) produces an increase in anxiety, while the pursuit of an investigation of the structures of consciousness as Honest and devoted practice, leads to liberation and joy.
I have been thinking a lot about the strange concept of romantic love and how it drives so much misery in our culture and leaves so many people open to deception. There is the myth of the protected magic circle of true love between two people which allows them to think in such small terms about their connection to the world as if they can rely upon 1 other person to supply them with all the necessities and joys in life. It is a relationship fraught with danger especially when most people do not even know themselves well enough trust their own judgment in making decisions for their own future. All of this based on a little evidence and feelings that are easily led astray, especially in a culture that worships such relationships more than our relationships to people who provide us with food and keep so many parts of our world running around us and our world and all the pieces of our environment which sustain us.
I am investigating my feelings and experiences with this idea and the nature of my relationships with other people, especially the people I have tried to exist with in a romantic way. I want to find a way to be intimate yet not consumed, to leave my attention open to all that is happening around me and all of the relationships that connect me to the world. No matter how important one other person in my life is I am enveloped in the world, inseparable from it. I can’t escape it into a magical universe that only includes two people or just my family, but it is so easy to fall into that trap and in the end, leaves me open to all kinds of misery trying to control the world to maintain that illusion or the illusion that life has less value without that kind of relationship. My life is always going to be lived in connection with all other life on this planet.
Myriad Ways 