Standing by the living room window, staring at the giant billboard at the end of my street, but nothing at all. The smoke from the joint envelops me. Enya’s voice bellows from my speakers. Soon the first semester of my PhD will be done and then it will just continue. Everything will keep going and I can’t stop it from happening. My Saturn fully returned last week on the most ordinary day you can imagine. I am in the fold of the waves, and the only way to get out of the waves is through the folds, but the folds consume you one by one. As soon as I come to any resolve, even on the smallest scale, a new obscurity flows into my mind full of propensity to keep expanding the huge clear ocean, only to be in relation to a fucking black unknown infinite body water I don’t even know exists yet (every time I think I know its properties, it changes, like the angels in Evangelion).
In the last few days of summer 2009, j and I ended up in Brighton & I fell in love with miao & the miao & the miao & we listened to Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting on repeat & Red & I argued about music taste politics & then we ran around into town to get more miao. This went on for three days & I wore the same outfit from Brighton onto the train to Gatwick onto the plane back & then we arrived home in the afternoon & I was still high & everything was perfect & our bed was soft & we laid down smiling until we managed to fall asleep in the sun glow & then he left to work the next day & the best summer of my life was over.
.
I can’t seem to grasp the present as it’s happening at all. Being present in the moment is a notion that is completely lost on my perceptual and sensual ability. I imagine a life with so much less suffering if only I could engage in this act more often than once a year or less! All I can see in front of me is my past, choking me, penetrating me, manipulating me into a futurity, and I totally let it –repeatedly.
.
Since his visit last weekend, I feel more connected to my brother than ever before. I wonder if he feels it too? I feel that the connection I have with him is one I will never have with anyone else, in any way, in every way. I love him more than anyone I’ve ever loved, I love him more than my mom, more than my grandfather. All love is different, but not so completely different. Not all love makes you know you would sacrifice your life for someone.
I fantasize about having children so that they can feel the intensity of sibling love too.
I want to give you a sign, a sign which shows you how to find for yourself a way within, through the waves, but there’s nothing I can say which is really adequate to the task. No one really has a way through the waves, because there’s no need to find a way… the real way is by being the entire ocean, including all the waves, which doesn’t require doing anything at all, because you are already that: this is a better word than “that”, actually. One can’t really show the way to anyone, even yourself, for that reason, but nevertheless it’s not pointless to leave clues, to find clues, to follow the clues, the hints. I don’t have a better way than anyone else, because you can’t “have” it, even if you find something it’s not yours, or it was always already yours.
But, one hint is, to be what you already are (the ocean, and the waves), to be something more than the vantage point you think you are, being consumed by the folds. If all you can see are the folds consuming you, then you can try to feel the folds themselves are already the ocean, not just connected to it where you have to follow the path out and out, but just the ocean exactly as it is, now.
Katharine and I saw Melancholia the other day. There’s another hint at the way which isn’t a way, in that film. There are lots of these hints, always everywhere. In every instant.
Resolve can’t be found through a momentary decision, because the decision is just our way of marking, making a mark, but underneath the mark is still the roiling ocean. Real resolve isn’t self-control but feeling the hugeness of everything in each ephemeral moment, that is to say, letting the vastness come forward into the open and play, itself, somewhat raw and uncivilized, and then letting that connect with and participate with and bring time and timelessness together so they’re seen to be the same, which is to say, let the wildness and the decisions be in the same space at the same time, not divided, or at least unified even if divided. There’s a way through this without going through anything at all. I wish I could show it to you through a physical gesture. You don’t have to struggle with it, with the problem, with how to be present, try to find the way even in confusion presence has always been there, the past is created now with your gaze.
ps if the rawness can come forward and time and timelessness be the same (as they already are), then resolve is much more possible: but not the resolve of “self-control” or of “control” but rather a resolve which lets the longer, deeper rhythm coexist with the momentary impulse, be coextensive with it. Then suffering becomes the same as liberation, samara = nirvana, responsiveness can flow with consistency without being rigid. Responsive, yes, but not capricious.
love.
You may have not intended to do so, but I assume you might have managed to express the state of mind that a lot of men and women are in. The sense of wanting to help, but not knowing how or exactly where, is one thing a lot of us are going through.