Lazy. Lamentable.

May 7, 2008

Holding out your arms
Waving in the air like fans,
You take your sail and wrap it.
Around your face, around you
Like the fading wind.

February 8, 2008

Thoughts on life, love, and the pursuit of happiness.

What happens when you give up on your dream? Is it something you are conscious of, fully aware of, accepting of? Or is it something that simply happens? –The pursuit of happiness.

I’ve not fully given up on any dream that has substance. I’ve let go of things and I’ve stopped pursuing things that have no basis in reality, but I have never once thought to give myself up to the demon of settling for less. Must dreams be ungrounded and unrealistic? My dreams have included but are not limited to fashion, art, writing, romance, travel, and family- when I was younger I had no way to ground them, but as I’ve grown up a tiny bit I’ve found ways to include each of them in my future plans. I hope that I never get to the point in my life where I give up on the things that I love, simply to “get by.” I cannot and will not simply “get by,” I may as well give up on this life if that were the case. The beauty about this life is that we have choices: every day we have a choice to make, and every new situation poses new opportunities in which to grow and to make our dreams realities. So why give up? I’m still a baby. I’m still learning to walk, I’m still drinking from a bottle and taking naps in the afternoon. It scares me to think about how I am ever going to finish school, to get a real job, to make things happen, and to eventually have a family. But I’ve given up on the whys and the hows, now it’s about doing. It may be fun to ask those philosophical questions, but sitting in coffee shops and talking in circles never saved anybody from drowning. It’s good to speculate on the practical questions of life, but no one ever lived life by asking how to eat, they had to do the thing to learn how, and then the how ceases to matter.

New thought. Life.

I’ve looked back on the past few years and realized how little things have meant. While they were happening they were epic, possibly the end of my life as I knew it… dirty kisses meant love, flippant insults were mortal wounds, thoughtless rejection was a nail in my coffin, smiles were true friendship, nods of the head were license for decapitation. And yet I am completely unscathed. I am still a whole human being, more aware of my self and others, and hopefully more able to see beyond a single day’s emotions- I hope that I have grown. I hope that at the end of this life I will be as tall as a tree, with as many stories to tell as Grandmother Willow, and as content as a very fat honeybee. Emotions are the reactions to the changing waves of my life, and empty words the sounds of desperation that get lost in the spray and foam… the only thing that still resonates within me is the love I have for those close to me, for my self, and for the things I find beautiful on this earth. People come and go, faces change, opinions are never concrete, days become vague memories. The sun may go down but the hope we have of something more will never fade. To view life as meaningless, as disjointed, as hopeless, and to treat days and words as though they are disposable is to give up on the self, to commit suicide of the soul. There is nothing emptier than giving up on faith, whatever that faith looks like to you. Remember being a child? Go back to that, remember how it felt; then get up, find a purpose, and continue living life.
The object of intention is to find meaning. As there is meaning to everything in the universe save things manmade, how could I have ever thought that a day as being a separate thing, an island in the midst of my life? A day is a leaf on an immense tree, or more likely a single cell on a single leaf composed of thousands upon thousands of days, the swaying tree time itself- immovable but moving, fluid but purposed. There are so many words but so few that mean anything, and I struggle to find them so often… I am trying to say that what happens in a day is not the end, will not be the end, it is part of something much bigger. And we are all part of something much greater. A grain of sand in a glass, made of sand, made of little bits of being, made of time, made of sand, made of glass. It’s astonishingly beautiful. The ugliness is the expensive timepiece that chimes when you can’t help yourself. The ugliness is the cold marriage bed, the caged bird, the empty bottles of beer, the promises never meant, the broken heels, the bruises on the neck, and the dead hands that cling to others for their warmth. We say we don’t need people, so we surround ourselves with things and spend half our time breathing our life into them, while treating people like the things that should never have had souls. We say we only need ourselves and we’ll make it, but we can’t love ourselves enough to stay out of other people’s beds, or to get out of our own. We use people to feel something, when that fails we use chemicals to feel something, when that fails we give into oblivion. That something that everyone is looking for is not something to be felt. It is Something that should be said, should be spoken aloud every minute of our lives, and shouldn’t be traded for an imitation of freedom that is actually bondage.

“I can hardly comprehend
There’s something about the divine nature that is inside us and kills us when we give up our faith… but kills us the wrong way. That grain of divinity
Gives us life, and causes the truest pain, and the best pain, when we understand
What it is there for. Otherwise we die in the bile, shit, and blood of what’s left.”

Love. It’s the most beautiful thing.

I guess I’ve fallen in love with someone before. I’m talking about the romance kind of love that is wonderfully painful because it has something of that divine nature in it, because it represents the union of divine and terrestrial- not the love that most of us have known, which is not love at all but a trick of light that singes the heart and parades itself like a painted whore. Most of us have known plenty of that not-love, though I don’t have a name for it… it is different than straightforward lust because it uses the heart, however cruelly. It is cold: it is the cause of divorce, it is why the marriage bed is cold, it is why sex is a weapon, a god, and little more than a pastime, it is the source of pandemic loneliness, it is the reason women cannot live in harmony, and the reason men don’t treat women as they should be treated. We’ve all had our share.
I take it back: I have never fallen in love. I have felt it, I have come dangerously close to it, but I have never fallen into its aromatic depths. If I had truly fallen, I doubt that I would be talking about it. I have, however, come so close that I can only be happy for this person, but I cannot view them as a friend anymore. Maybe one day, but not now, not soon. My heart is raw from a divine wound not caused by a human being, but by the dangerous power of Venus herself. Read That Hideous Strength to understand. Everyone else I have been with, and sadly there have been more than a few, stand in my memory as grey. I felt momentary pain at each end, but nothing so dangerous as the truth; the only thing I feel when I think about the others is a sense of emptiness, a fog that settles over my memory. This fog leads me to believe that that which is not divine, which has little or no truth to it, kills the soul. It’s like telling lies, only committing them with other people’s bodies.