This is just to say
Monday, August 11th, 2008I love my life. It's so warm, and so sweet.
Blessings on those who've forgotten me. To forget me is to move beyond me, and there is so, so much beyond me. I can't wait to see it.
Archive for the ‘prayer’ Category
and so
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008Maybe the Quakers are right, and deep inside each of us is an ineffable light that burns without moving, like a pilot light. What we know about the universe might be described as a combination of what our senses tell us, what our minds deduce, and what some deeper part of us discovers through various mysterious processes, intuition, divination, entanglement with some nonprovable but very definite aspect of reality. But even that deeper part isn't exactly the light - it's more like a nebulous self that floats inside the body, that wears the body like a costume. Maybe the light is the combination of all these things, and maybe it's something else entirely - some fixed connection to the harmony of things. When I think of it, I envision it as a teardrop-shaped thing, pale gold, living inside a little cave in my body. I sense it as my true and complete self, almost entirely hidden from the world because it's so fragile and childlike. It's so immersed in wonder that it almost feels naive - it trusts everything, marvels at everything, and has no inherent knowledge of evil. I love it, I want it like air, and I feel sorry for myself that I can only experience it in little glimpses and find it so hard to share it with others.
But I've been so lucky in this life. When was the last time you lay in bed with someone you really loved, and felt that little cave in you open like a hand? When was the last time you lay there and felt that light in another?
discovered
Monday, September 10th, 2007Blessings on the forgotten, and the wonderful, and the strange.
Witness
Wednesday, August 1st, 2007On foot and absorbing the day, swimming in the fanged heat of just another summer. For every person you pass, say to yourself, we could have been lovers. For every child you see, say, that could be my child. Wander and wander into other lives, not between worlds but in this one, solidly, with shadow and weight.
First, there are blocks of pawn shops, and men young and old lingering on street corners with nothing to do. Some are waiting for buses, but most of them are just waiting. Their heads are full of hip hop, jazz, elevator pop songs, anxious calculations for electric bills, mortgages, foodstamp lines and welfare lines. You think of a city in California, where once you walked two miles from a bread line to your dive apartment with fifty pounds of beans and rice. Remember the ache in your shoulders as you carried your private and shameful world?
Wander on: a neighborhood where everyone is tasteful and owns a duvet, where the terms "artist" and "independently wealthy" often go together, and the furniture of sidewalk cafes is all immaculate wicker and wood. A woman here will say hello to you, and she'll make you think of that woman in Baltimore, who stopped to ask if you were all right because you were sitting alone at the grave of a poet in a bad part of the city. You wonder if there are only so many types of people, repeating and repeating through all cities and all walks of life, but you only need to talk to one to realize that each bears a unique payload of wonders.
The neighborhood of Russian Jews and its amazing odor of fresh bread, like being in Crown Heights again. The neighborhood of dive bars and Asian groceries that makes you think of Portland. Farther and farther into the city's belly, where the ancient markers of the Revolution lay, where the underground railroad kept its many stations. A house with a band practicing, loud and messy, and you can almost feel the years peel away from you, your hair past your shoulders, a beer in your hand, your friends not yet heavy and lovely with children. A man with boots just like the ones you owned, back in the day. A pair of hips, a face that could be her face. They pass you and walk down into history, into relics and archives, commending themselves with each step to historians and librarians who fold them into the dream we call the Republic.
Maybe you'll see them again, somewhere in the footnotes and annotations that might be your legacy. Maybe history is like an airport or a train station, everyone gathered together and waiting to journey into whatever corner of the great record belongs to them. In this place, there is no time; everyone is there, and waiting to shake your hand. Who are you? they'll ask. To each of them, say: remember that news article about the murders, or the great disaster, or the wonderful forgotten thing? I'm the one they quoted. I'm the witness, the anonymous source, the bystander's voice without a name. Dear traveler, dear reader, remember me.
the meditation
Friday, May 11th, 2007In every day, the miraculous unfolds in the form of my persistence, the carrying-on of my heart and head. Today, for now, I am a citizen of the living world, however far I or this world have fallen. I wake, drink coffee, watch the news, watch strangers, sweat in the sunlight, cool in the shade, participate in the hundred million gestures that constitute life in this century. I cast a shadow, have weight, understand this moment as now and not perhaps or almost. It's all so common, so quotidian and unremarkable, but at times, it is more than i can imagine.
