I chose to walk to the salon today for my haircut appointment (first haircut in 7 months!) and was hit with 70% humidity. I started regretting my decision as I walked in severely direct sunlight, but then I looked upwards. I discovered the flowers that had somehow made their way skyward. I smiled.
god. curling up in your arms, not knowing what to ask you for because i was just inundated with thoughts of the consequences of living boldly and investing heart into something i’m terrified of.
this makes my whole body tingle. The poet Ted Hughes, in a letter to his (and Sylvia Plath’s) son.
That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realise you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self—struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence—you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself. The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all. It was a saying about noble figures in old Irish poems—he would give his hawk to any man that asked for it, yet he loved his hawk better than men nowadays love their bride of tomorrow. He would mourn a dog with more grief than men nowadays mourn their fathers.
And that’s how we measure out our real respect for people—by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate—and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you.
And, as Virginia Woolf put it,
“I am rooted, but I flow.”
goodness, can you believe that today we’re saying goodbye to March already?
Shoko Wanger writes:
It’s occurred to me recently that what my own world looks like – its seasons, its moons, the speed of its orbit – is something I have a hand in shaping.
And two more from Anais Nin:
I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.
You live… sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterly, for instance), or you take a trip…and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure…Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken. They are like the people who go to sleep in the snow and never awaken.
It’s going to be April tomorrow, we will awake, together we will gleefully climb our way out of the snow, we will find sunlight (and along with it, the strength to create our own planets). We have survived yet another almost-unbearable winter, and we will hold our heads high into the sunlight. Perhaps, even, the weight of our dreams will seem like air. Next week, my little ship will be crash landing onto fiery Texas sunsets and bluebonnets (and hopefully, maybe, into eyes of a similar hue). I’ve studied your moons. Measured the speed of your orbits. Been captured (captivated?) by the persistence of your gravity. This is the only season we have yet to see in our world. Like I said – creation of our own planets.
