On Romance

We share a rather curious, almost perfunctory sort of intimacy together:

we share mundane time.

We eat-and sometimes prepare-meals together; we shop for food together, which we are (in a mild way, admirably) committed to not wasting; we take walks; we sleep side by side most nights; we attend events but we do not discuss these events; we do not talk about the future; we do not traffic in conversation involving our idealism, our aspirations, our hopes, our fears...

We do, however, occasionally mention the details of a dream we've had.

We brush our teeth, we bathe, we dress in concert. We joke and laugh.

You say only a little about your family and I even less about mine.

We scarcely touch upon current events.

We never philosophize.

Yet, within all this-

which is to say, this something which is almost nothing in terms of passion or intellect or vivid experience-

there is a certain earthbound sincerity that I find moving, although it confounds me.

We are as united as two earthworms wriggling together in the soil or two bits of mist clinging to their individual motes of dust in the air, which is to say almost not at all.

Together or apart, we exist.

Together, we are islands who dimly acknowledge that though the depths of an ocean lie between us, even deeper still we are connected.

A moment

I want to dissolve into the wood of this ancient temple, to be such a true green made in a monk’s bowl and applied lovingly, with such devotion

It would be enough for me, just to be a spot of pure color in the midst of all the fine details, a background for everything else to shine against

Pigment dense within the grain, a saturated, living coolness pleasing to the eye, beckoning contemplation

The very shade of a certain kind of calm, alert and relaxed, filled with an undeniable vitality yet soft and yielding

Like fresh rice shoots in an early morning field against a crane’s legs that patiently awaits the subtle rustling of a frog.

a poem. yes, a poem.

okay.

so…there’s nothing.

there’s nothing to it.

sit upon a moment in time & pin it to a thought a process a page a desire another moment….

another moment passing & another & soon all the time in the world becomes no time & you look into your hands & find there’s nothing.

watch your mind wander lonely as Wordsworth’s cloud

attach to…

nothing.

okay.

but Wordsworth’s metaphorical you arrives in a field of floral gold & just like that:

there’s something.

there’s something you’re not going to quite pin down, a thought you can’t quite complete, a process of understanding never fully understood.

you & I are not the question asking we are the intaking thoughtbreaking wave thinking to formulate an answer

some method of response…

A Consideration

There are hollows in bodies, and toughnesses, roughnesses, the scar tissues that develop to fill the empty spaces, to protect what's left,

to smooth over what is traumatized and broken.

Bodies have more than the bound muscles, the jittering tendons, the calcifications,

the inappropriate stockpiles of confused tissue.

They have experiences that take up virtually no space in the physical world of cells, bones, hair, teeth, skin, muscles, organs and brains.

Yet the same process, unexpectedly, applies.

Wherever the body retains its emotions and memories it also develops hollows and holes, protections, accretions, noumenal shields that ultimately help less than they harm, for all the well-intentioned generative energy inspiring them to form.

Wherein we learn how coming to the rescue is ideally the lightest of touches, a most delicate rebalancing.

How to convince the body of this?

That's "accepting the God that you are".

That is a stunningly powerful self-awareness.

But if we are more than an imprisoned consciousness in a body that is more than renegade mitochondria and viral invasions, we ought to convincingly direct the magical processes of this sentient organism in a holistic expression of selfhood that at least accepts when enough is enough and more is too much, is harmful, is self defeating.

In Celebration of Naivete

Disturbance. A disturbance of factors, a chaos of challenges...what are the group names for packets of events in life??
A quantum of solace, indeed!
Buying time and gaining experience...
I feel chained to survival and absurdity.
I continue to feel that somehow, someway, it is possible to unleash a chain reaction of liberation, and I do not mean death, I mean embodied, vibrant, here and NOW change that can make living a coherent bliss.
Why not??

Naivete is another word for truth, one truth, the truth of the child.
And in the abstract, the child--as a sensory organ of the planet--is keen, uncorrupted. Lacking context in the adult regard, but having a much more basic contextual map for determining right and wrong, happiness and disappointment, for what enjoyment is and the purposes of a body and a consciousness.

I am grateful that I've retained a significant amount of my naivete into adulthood, even though it makes me churn through a lot of confusion often, even though I am made to feel the fool by people who are more pragmatic and realistic than I am.

We should have no desire at all to shackle the dreamers in the world.

I understand my value on that level, at least, although it makes me feel ashamed to admit it. But this knowledge encourages me to persevere...
which could be just another example of confirmation bias, but one must have an internal compass, a gut instinct to follow in life.

Tools for vanquishing fear.

Musing

The ivory is broken off, the tusks are all busted.

Enamel crumbles to cerulean dust in the temples.

All that ached to begin already began or it didn't, it hasn't, it won't.

The myths coalesced around whirlwinds of confusion and desire, they sped up, increased their gravity, collected debris, artifacts, hit escape velocity, forgot to look back.

How else do constellations form?

Energy must seek material expression,

just as matter must seek release,

or at least surrender to it,

dissolve into the unknown qualities of its own escape velocity.

That sigh is a first breath, not a cosmic wind but the originating tone of a new universe.

The deserts expand--it's immaterial.

Wood is only a substance for a moment, and then: nothing.

After the fire and smoke, not even the ash remains,

not even a whisper.

How much finer must we get with quantum physics to understand that it isn't the visible imprint that carries the content of anything we might call knowledge

or fact, or meaning,

it's the movement, the action, that ferries this burden, that traffics in actual significance.

The endpoint quantity we hope to arrive at is not anything static that may be captured.

Nothing of the sort.

If anything, it is that moment of escape and its echo.

We need to wrest the meaning, the significance, the heart, the life-or-death necessity of Beauty back from the bloodless jaws, the inexorable plastic machinery of commodity enslavement that threatens to make it extinct.