Writings

Even Now
I read it once, a poem
Saved in the depths of a small novel.
Even now, the memory of love’s infatuation from earlier in life.

The way you think is the way you feel.

Or is it, the way you feel is the way you think?

Can’t it be both? Aren’t they inseparable and not something to disentangle in an effort to establish a source. The source is right here, watching silently.

This room I visit never sleeps. It watches as I come to bed. It waits around me through the night. And when I wake and leave, it is there, silent and accepting, and will stay until I return.

Like every place we come to know, it is always ready. All places are a silent waiting for little lives to pass through, in routines, on journeys. They do not love, they do not care, but silently by being there, they let us know ourselves.

The room watches, so we know life a little better.

Do not take the easy ways out from feelings and from faith. That road is not a path, and you will discover nothing on it.

A road gets you from one place to another. A path is where you make discoveries.

A road is you and the road. A path is you.

A road, you seek the destination. A path, you are in the world, arriving at every moment.

Atonement begins on the path where you meet the most difficult person you know.

Your creative energy will hold your life in check until it is released.

That energy will block not only your feelings, turning them to tension, pain, and despair, but it will also block your very experience of life.

We each one of us are a type of god: our creation is our being. We cannot fully exist without it.

Is it hopelessness you feel when you look at all the work you want to get done? And is it work that you want done or work that stands in the way of work you want done?

Either way, the energy waits. And you are not alone among people if you feel a twisting of panicked shame around the crown the head, somewhere in your gut, wherever… the unreleased energy will find its place to wait.

Creative energy holds everything in check. It can wait till you die, or you can become you and be it in the world

*But start with creative energy: be that creative energy and what else is in your life will fit and flow and find release, even the fear of death, which is only another disguised place of waiting.

Now read this passage by Martin Buber, and feel no regret other than as a step forward:

from The Way of Man: According to Hasidic Teaching by Martin Buber

On the gray, flat roof of a Brooklyn building,
Square and safe and separate from the city,
Watching a crescent moon sink towards Manhattan,
Enjoying the night breeze after a hot day,
Saturn, rising over my left shoulder,
Is a tiny promise that reminds me of a tiny thought
From earlier that I wanted to release
From the silence and share:

That when you crave and follow your desire
You turn your back on that which craved
And leave that hopeless, needing part alone to wait
Perhaps until the moon waxes full, and
Tiny Saturn is gone, and you realize your mistake
And wait again, saying nothing, for the need’s return.

There might be a flower growing and you won't have to pluck it. Just look and remember the clichés about velvet and fragility, about blood and ink, youth and time? Can a simple flower hold all these ideas?

Think a moment, how would you feel if you were that flower, looking out into the mirror of the world, and saw your human self as you are right now, reading, aging, complicating your life, rattling off your reasons for this and that, hating or admiring yourself, begrudging?

We’ve given so many clichés to flowers. Can they give us back ourselves in return?

Why do we insist on loving old dogs?
We could escape the inevitable pain
Of their inevitable demise
By simply never loving at all.
In that, you’ll find every answer.

Why are we moved to love?
We know that death always wins.
Always. The grizzled, twitching hound,
The lifelong partner, pal, or parent.
Death takes them all or it takes you first.

Every time, every love
In human history.
Death takes them all.
Lowly old hounds,
Intense first loves,
Courtly fools—
It does not matter.

So, why love?
Is love pretense that things are okay?
An escape from the waiting room of death
For an instant, an hour—even a lifetime
If you’re that lucky one who goes first?
Is that the joy of having children—
You leave them to grieve for you?

Or do we need to learn
This lesson: that Love is
Hopeless and necessary
If we are to live in this world.
And we have no other, after all.

You accept the painful tangle of grief
For something so paltry and uncomplicated
As the affection of an old dog?

In the sterile waiting room
Everything is so clear,
So obviously inevitable
And without hope.

We cannot live and stay
In a sterile waiting room.
We are neither the wise
Or the invulnerable who can sit there
As death sharpens his blade for us.
We must go out
Beyond that door to live.

The living are those
That keep piling in
And passing through
This room,
Sobbing and laughing,
Not noticing the deadly still
And sterile smell as they
Try and fail to keep close
That wet old dog with the twitching leg
That always in life just thrilled at being alive
And now moves faster through that door
Than we can follow
Until our time is come.

—

Feeling tangled up, restless, achy, and hopeless? Procrastinating about something? Creativity is not the result; it is the process that will get you moving.