The socially-agreed beginning of a new cycle may not always coincide with our own transformative rhythms. Yet, it offers a prompt for reflection and an invitation to revisit the trail of thoughts and actions which mirror the incessant change we undergo. Below, I offer assorted journal excerpts from the year 2019, interspersed with quotes of personal significance encountered in readings completed during this time.
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What charming serendipity it is to hit the precise middle of the journal when writing this particular entry. Perhaps it is yet another way in which life signals how extraordinary this transformation was and continues to be. I enter this new year with a sense of purpose and direction, inspired and buoyed by an unrelenting sequence of symbolic occurrences.
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Dancing is a self-sustaining energy; movement is not produced by the dancer, rather the dancer is produced by the movement, and the physical body is but a channel for the underlying unified current of existence.
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Understanding does not imply control and the value of control is overestimated.
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An inflated sensation, it makes itself known intermittently, becoming pronounced in moments of weakness. A craving of unrequited desire, it reeks of an inability to find happiness in ‘merely’ caring for oneself. I am not enough for me and with fluctuations in the quality of the mind this hidden current begins to inundate the cage of self-diagnosed loneliness, forcing rushed panic in the poor creature inside which cannot comprehend itself as the ultimate source of both bars and liquid.
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As though forcing something ever works. When we talk of taking manners into our own hands that does not imply that systematic effort and perseverance apply to enticing someone to desire or love you. For truth in such union can only derive from an essence within, an essence which remains shrouded as long as under-satisfaction with one’s solitude persists. Nejteh’s commandments must be reminded:
- Spend time alone.
- Take care of yourself.
- Stop texting so much.
- Permit energies to float to you on their own accord.
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My guardian saints or demons of desires expressed past their time ferment in longing and untimeliness. The cycle is complete and what felt like opportunities missed turned out to be nothing but that. One year it took to clear out the fables of romance seeking in me nothing more than an emotional plaything which they did not suspect might want to play right back and play in the junior league no more.
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‘To be an artist means: not to reckon and count; to ripen like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of Spring without fear lest no Summer might come after. It does come. But it comes only to the patient ones, who are there as if eternity lay in front of them, so unconcernedly still and far.’
‘And perhaps the sexes are more akin than we suppose, and the great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maiden, freed from all false feelings will seek each other not as opposites but as brother and sister, as neighbours, and will unite as human beings to bear in common, simply, seriously and patiently, the heavy sex that has been laid upon them.’
In Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
lent to me by my dear Rebekka, who has been an influence of huge importance.
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I am furious at how I was taught to accept the full burden of contraception as my prerogative.
I am furious at how normal it was for me to put my body through hormonal pills and an IUD, both of which I subsequently realised impact huge damage on both the physical and psychic state.
I am furious that this realisation had to occur through negative experience and not preemptive medical consultation.
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To write is to trust in others; to trust that they too yearn to feel for the sake of it.
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My emotional landscape has stretched in much the way a womb does – through circumstance and the miracle of death.
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‘For who would deny that transformation is the most primal task with which [hu]man[ity] today is faced?’
In Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties by Rainer Maria Rilke
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‘Nothing can surpass the mystery of stillness.’
In Selected Poems, Poem 7 by E. E. Cummings
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I told her I have a sense that something significant will happen, that I don’t know what it is but that I sense it hover in the web of immanent planes surrounding the radiating centre that is my consciousness. And then I began to cry.
I wept and recognised my loneliness, the longing to be held and touched. Tanya did so, she held me in the park and took me home and put me to bed and held me again as I slept. I discovered my loneliness and an indispensable friend who abandoned free time to the needs of another; who conceded to the whims of a mind afflicted by substance because she knows love and sacrifice and does not measure either with that tiny spoon we call modern intimacy.
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Permit yourself to release that which you have been holding onto for so long.
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I am peaceful in my solitude and solitary in my peace.
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The step that follows in my practice is to accept that should my peace and happiness remain context-dependent in an infinite reality in perpetual flux my state will forever be at the mercy of unpredictable circumstance.
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It is as if life had been locked until now, locked in the worry of securing financial insurance by doing what must be done. Now, focus and energy can be dedicated to discovering purpose and in its vessel let happiness take root. That sacral vessel, so tight and compressed through attempting to restrain the unpredictability of life, can now open as I finish knitting the net that ensures I will not fall straight to the ground should turbulence knock me off my path or the path out of me. I find freedom in knowing I have done what I could to secure the securable, that which shall cushion when the un-securable reverberates once more – for that is all one can do. I stand tall upon a grounded base, knowing that effort has rooted me in my existence; and from this base leap lightness and freedom to play and explore that immaterial flow that makes life the profound and curious experience, fully psychedelic, that it is. I must no longer hold on to live, but let the current take me where I need to be fully; and this time around I shall do so from solitude springing and from where no preconceived progression exists. I am free, liberated from others’ expectations and my own, pulling the breaks on capitalistic drivers of efficiency and achievement, doing what I please with little planning or concern for how long things will take. I am not blind to opportunity nor do I wallow in reckless abandon as I permit things to frame themselves instead of trying to force my own form on life.
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These writings and the books I took with me here will be damaged by water and salt. Yet I accept this with the conviction of peace as the pristine moves me so much less than it did before, sprouted from the final and much needed understanding that perfection is the mirage in which a troubled mind attempts to hide its vulnerability and suffering.
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I now understand the value in retracing one’s steps and revisiting the past. Such journeys open up wounds not yet healed as the presence of the splinter of grief forever incites the low-lying infection that may be purposefully overlooked. Such journeys expose the wound, awarding the opportunity for definitive resolve. May there be purpose in the cracking crust and may the flowing blood cleanse the void in the tissue that the splinter removed, at last, affords.
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How much can one build if each day has the purpose of securing the next?
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Permit things to happen as they do, not as per your conception of how they should.
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I am conflicted, torn and confused, and what my intuition makes of the message is almost unthinkable. Untangling this one is the most fragile challenge of emotional diplomacy I have ever had to face.
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The state of release is to find freedom of action unimpeded by self-frustration and anxiety in trying to control the self.
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Никога няма да забравя как седяхме по покривите във Вединг,
При Дима и Хуан,
Изпълзявайки през дупката в тавана
Или катерейки се вън, през балкона,
Неизменно по онази стълба,
Която винаги за мен ще бъде нестабилна,
Вървейки по плоския покрив,
По който неотменно си расте мъх.
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I wrote a poem on the short walk from Hermannplatz to Reuterstrasse. My emotions still swirling and still listening to that same song, I began to dance in the living room hoping for release. It helped momentarily but when I stopped it returned, all-consuming. As I went into my room my mother messaged ‘I just wanted to say that I love you.’ I began to cry as the warmth in my hands intensified.
I sat there, tears running down my face, Brahem in my ears, warm palms facing, exchanging with the world. As I cried, I was reminded of times prior where something such may have happened. I experimented, cupping my hands over my leaking eyes, placing them in prayer, intertwining them as profound lovers would. I couldn’t bear the muchness of it and so I opened palms to the world once more, wondering whether this, all this might be a reflection of what he is feeling or needing – was he, just now, grieving, in need of being held, with me the one needed to hold?
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We seek to feel, but I wonder if we are truly ready to experience what flows beneath, connecting us all once the mind’s constructs fall away.
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There was a couple on the table in the corner. The woman, perceptibly younger than the man, never permitted a smile – a joyless boredom in her eyes. They sat there in silence for the length of one drink. I saw them both type messages but not once converse or laugh together.
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Само дърво не гори.
Или?
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