Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Number Five

It's all good -- the joy, the loss, the cruelty, the beauty.  It's all good -- the violent blow and tender touch, the avarice and selfless gift, sweet kindness and addiction.  These are the ways we learn, become.  These are the paths that teach us.

In one important way, all paths are equal, all deserving to be loved: they lead to what we came here to know.  It's all good -- the triumph and failure, the love discovered and the love ruined.  Because it's all life, a play we agreed to be in.  A story full of what we needed here.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Number Three

When we enter the garden, the place we sought of belonging and peace, the light comes from a certain angle of the sun.  As the sun moves, the shadows lengthen.  Each face is caught in darkness and light.

The garden changes, becoming lonely and then hidden.  Dangerous.  The place we sought becomes the place we run from.  It is the same place.  It is the garden of day and night.

The person we loved becomes the person we leave. It is the same person.  The place that felt home becomes, in every room, a cue for regret.  For the surprising bitterness when the sun changes, and all that was there, and was expected to go on, turns dark.

In the garden of day and night we cling to the day and lose it.  Then the dark seems everything there is.

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Number Two

The loneliness takes hold at the instant of birth.  We have bathed in the River Lethe, the waters of forgetfulness.  And all we know is that something is wrong; we are lost, unreachable.  We hunger to merge and our bodies prevent us.  We long to feel part of "the whole." Yet we can't hear the chords of a song that surrounds us.

The loneliness is so loud it drives us to the silence of each other's arms.  Pressing.  Full of the effort to speak, to know, to enter.  The loneliness is so loud that all we can hear is our own heartbeat, the mortality of empty space.

Everything we do requires it -- the exile with no memory of what home is, the faces we don't recognize, the path that leads nowhere except death.  Everything we learn demands this isolation -- the confines of bone and flesh, a life in the outposts where our greatest need seems so far away.