Friday, September 22, 2006
The luminous interval life
Passions are drawn out through the ages, but rest in little rivulets, overflowing with self, in micrcosms here and there. We forget this, wrapped up in our certainties and mundanities, until we are invited in, briefly, by the flash of light, a smooth surprising stream of incense, the pattern of water flowering on the bathroom tiles and window, or the intonations and curves of a person's voice. These draw one down and exude passion. Aha! There it is! The sound of ages and sages and audacious delights...a quickening. Memory is abolished and renewed in contagious flight. We suddenly remember, feel, our failures and loves and needs and desires and unwritten almosts, our futures diminishing, as they must,because everything dies, including tide itself. So we are pressed, but the squeeze is good, and we beckon it, call it forth even as it calls us, a circle of passion we hold as long as we can, until the light shifts, the incense fades, water dries and voices break. We are back in the world of the everyday.
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6 comments:
Well, I have to say, I love this. You emcompass so much with so few words...yet the words you choose are like darting little hummingbirds, tiny, bright and bursting, so much energy, so fleeting, so dark and lovely and perfect. And the topic is nice, the little perfections and hidden moments of beauty that we overlook, until they whack us over the head (see? "what"? my words suck). Your blog is one of those passionate little rivulets. Thanks!
sorry for all the deletions, by the way, I'm a confuseling.
You illustrate that we, most of us, spend most of our days and nights as little more than robots working at jobs we hate and that are meaningless, and doing the things we deem necessary simply to survive, shopping, cleaning, gardening, sleeping. When we are so engaged we are on automatic pilot and…..well…..robotic, when we are in neutral, neither happy nor unhappy, and feel nothing.
And we spent much of the time we are not neither happy nor unhappy, being just unhappy (does this sound like Rumsfeld-speak?) Given this, what percentage of our lives do we spend living in the moment, just being, and feeling, or just being happy? Probably just a tiny percent.
So it shouldn’t surprise us that most of us (but perhaps just men) are so interested in sex, for what is more in-the-moment than making love, and engaging in all the deliciously beautiful, and ideally prolonged, preamble to it? So it’s sad that most of us go through life romantically disappointed and unfulfilled.
Perhaps this is why there are so many wars in the world, since the men who start them may all have disappointing love-lives, for why would a man, who has a wonderful love-life, want to start a war?
M,
I appreciate the compliments, and hope that you are one of those individuals that see the flows and bends and rivulets.
Biff,
I agree with you that the percent of time we spend appreciating the daily wonders of the world are rare and fleeting. Why is this? How do we step out of this "robotic" life? Sexual expression is probably one way. Mindful meditation another. Just "waking up" to what's around you, though a seldom occurance, another.
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