fear of the inexplicable

i was never comfortable with the social niceties of friendship. i knew the terms but didn't learn them.

by choice.

perhaps that's unhealthy, perhaps that's incomprehensible to most. perhaps that's wrong.

despite moments of self-recrimination and self-doubt - particularly questions related to self-worth i have held fast to this relational piece.

i see myself as connected to people with whose lives i was intended to intersect - for better or for worse (and i think that's why inpart, in the orthodoxy of christian marriage that phrase is so pointedly there!), adding the artifical architecture of friendship to these connections would trivialize their significance.

my deepest and most profound relationships are timeless - they are not judged by the terms of this world - they are enriched by the terms of this world and others. they enrich this world and others.

i have been blessed to know extraordinary and beautiful people spirits who have brought unconditional love and joy into my life and for whom i have felt unconditional love and shared my joy in their very presence. sometimes these people spirits leave or are left. our connection ends. in the terms of this world there is sadness, loss, anger, hurt.

rainer maria rilke unpacked this soulful experience in his prose work fear of the inexplicable.

but fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. for it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.

but only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. for if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. thus they have a certain security. and yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeonsand not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode.

we, however, are not prisoners. no traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. we are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. we have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. and if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. how should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

rainer maria rilke

the shape of your eyes

rene magritte
le faux miroir, 1928


the first eyes i would have seen would have been my mother's. crystal blue like her own mothers. with the sound of her voice would have come the first understanding of how comfort, security and the eyes are linked. a connection that extends through all other like circumstances, where the intimacy of connection that includes the considerations of need, have arisen in my life.

you have heard the phrase, "the eyes tell stories".

stories hover in and around the eyes, as paul eluard's 1926 poem "the shape of your eyes" attests . . .

the shape of your eyes goes round my heart,

a round of dance and sweetness.

halo of time, cradle nightly and sure

no longer do I know what I've lived,

your eyes have not always seen me.

leaves of day and moss of dew,

reeds of wind and scented smiles,

wings lighting up the world,

boats laden with sky and sea,

hunters of sound and sources of colour,

scents the echoes of a covey of dawns

recumbent on the straw of stars,

as the day depends on innocence

the world relies on your pure sight

all my blood courses in its glance.

there are even greater stories . . .

the eyes are like the waistline of an hourglass. at either end of the narrowing there is an infinite perceptual opening. each moment, each atom is similarly constructed.

though the worlds are eighteen thousand and more,
not every eye can see them.
every atom is indeed a place of the vision of God,
but so long as it is unopened,
who says, "there is a door"?
[I, 3756; 3766] rumi

and so it is that other stories the eyes can tell are deeper, richer. in the telling of these stories, the eyes are like alice in wonderland's tunnel: "the rabbit hole went on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.

either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next."

when the mirror of your heart becomes clear and pure,
you'll behold images which are outside this world.
you will see the image and the image-maker,
both the carpet of the spiritual expanse
and the one who spreads it.
[II, 72-3] rumi



kristine schomaker
"down the rabbit hole"

at the end of the tunnel, "alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. how she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through the doorway;"

it is in being available to the moment, to the door that presents itself, to the intuition that unfurls into insight that awakening takes place.

three strange angels

at all times through my life after i realized i was aware of something other, i've lifted my nose and turned my sails in the direction of the fine fine wind that courses throughout this world. a sweet fine wind that carries the soul on its journey far far beyond land and sea!

each moment, an opportunity to remember the human condition presents itself. with attention to the significance and value of those moments comes the opportunity to address your place inside them. to see the mechanistic, the impulsive, the reactive, to locate their necessity, to assess their merit or to acknowledge the damage they are doing. my experience is that with consistent practice of this awareness comes the opportunity to move from awareness to sorrow, and from sorrow to wonder.



not i, not i, but the wind that blows through me!
a fine wind is blowing the new direction of time.
If only i let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!
if only i am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
if only, most lovely of all, i yield myself and am borrowed
by the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the
world
like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted;
if only i am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge
driven by invisible blows,
the rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the
hesperides.

oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,
i would be a good fountain, a good well-head,
would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.

what is the knocking?
what is the knocking at the door in the night?
it is somebody wants to do us harm.

no, no, it is the three strange angels.
admit them, admit them.

david herbert lawrence

all artwork courtesy of daniel paulo

the goodness i have been gifted with

i am aware of and can define in my perception of myself, an outward and an inner expression of that perception. i can also acknowledge my awareness of the dialogue between the two areas of self and then again of the creative force that issues out of this dialogue and describes features of my actual self.

one such dialogue sees the outer person ask the world for forgiveness for the inner person through acting the role of "fool" in the classic use of the role - the king's fool who describes the king with detail and accuracy and in so doing pokes fun at the power, the accoutrements, the ambitions of someone gifted with earthly power.

this has been my primary role in relation to the outer world since my childhood. it has provided me with security as it is a feature of the world's expectation of me and so easy to play into. it has provided me with a place to hide.

i learned the deep value and significance of induced or prepared joy.
the kind that can sustain a person like myself past the unsustainable.

i have also learned through the course of my life that this giving of hope and joy carries a price tag.
in part, the price is the expectation that there is an unlimited quantity of this joy.

it is actually limited only by my ability and willingness to pay the price.

in part there is also the misperception that the joy describes the person providing it.
this form of joy describes the needs of the person providing it.

this is clear in my personal and professional lives to those who know me in the real sense of knowing.

the outer person is my lifeline to my meal ticket. he acquires material goods, power, relationships, intimacies, acceptance.

the inner person is the self i have dialogue with, the sometimes grieving, sometimes truly joyous, sometimes immersed-in-the-truly-wondrous-goodness-i-have-been-gifted-with person that i am and am to be becoming.

through my life i have quieted the inner person, and quickly acquired items incuding image reinforcing roles and relationships; all of these to remind myself of my sense of myself as a worthy person.

these are things i want.
these are things i have.
these are significant and signify not only what i am and what I am capable of but also signify what i can get. these are measures of success in the material world.

and so, like the fool whose entirety is described by mimicry they are defined entirely by the foreground while the richness of the background is overlooked or carefully tucked away, peeking between the shutters of the fool's perceptions and needs.

in such seeming

it is possible that to seem - it is to be,
as the sun is something seeming and it is.

the sun is an example. what it seems
it is and such seeming all things are.

wallace stevens

the past is a place of description - whole experiences reduced to pointillist depictions that resolve into form when we stand back from them. the tiny speckles of coloured moments merge until forms appear and from these little forms come relationships and in that we articulate our knowing of what has been.

from that knowing of what has been - coupled with what is - we articulate our expectations of what might be or what we wish to be.

it is in that space - between the selective remembering of our known experiencing and our anticipation that what has gone before must necessarily repeat itself to some degree - that we articulate the suffering attached to unfulfilled expectation.

the arced line of connection that we draw through past and present experience is compromised by its apparent discontinuity when extended into the future becoming present, and that is where so much disappointment is focussed. our apparent entitlement to expect what is not "seeming and it is" to

the blurred form of an evening

the blurred form of an evening sky rushes past the night train. by the yellow-orange light of a fringed table lamp, a man pushes his face closer to the window. a small cloud of breath ebbs and flows from his mouth across the glass - a humid tongue of moisture.

stations and signals flow by the darkened window frame in sudden jarring colour-filled moments. an illuminated sign, a wall of brownish-red bricks, light flooding from an opening door, someone peering from behind a curtain.

life is like this.

window

night from a railroad car window
is a great, dark, soft thing
broken across with slashes of light.

carl sandburg

am i not i -- here?

watercolour by karen stefano

throughout my life i have not held much interest in being "a man". by definition it is a limited role. it holds back men and many of the "men" i know and love have left it behind. we are who we are. with little regard for the autocracy of expectation attached to what is essentially a genetic tag.

i have loved and love being a person. as whole as i can allow myself to be. as incomplete as my fears will allow myself to be.

here's how william carlos williams expresses this:

transitional

first he said:

it is the woman in us

that makes us write--

let us acknowledge it--

man would be silent.

we are not men

therefore we can speak

and be conscious

(of the two sides)

unbent by the sensual

as befits accuracy.

i then said:

dare you make this

your propaganda?

and he answered:

am i not i--here?

[(from the tempers, 1913) the collected earlier poems]

copyright © 1917, 1921 four seas company, copyright © 1934, the objectivist press, copyright © 1935, the alcestis press, copyright © 1936, reginald lane latimer, copyright © 1938, new directions publishing corporation, copyright © 1938, 1941, 1951 william carlos williams, copyright © 1966, florence h. williams

shining wings

in a life defined by moments - using the selective filter of hindsight - it appears to be arranged with some precision like a string of pearls.

a string of pearls comprised of moments that represent choices - and not the binary choices of childhood in which the present moving towards the future is defined by either/or, right/wrong, good or bad but the full spectrum of choices, the grey scale, the circle.

imagine the circle becoming a limitless space.
timeless.
without definition.

a space.

the long and full present moment.

how would you choose to fill it?

with what quality would you live your life if instead of recognizing the quality of a moment as a transitory thing in which you could do either the right thing or the wrong thing, what if you could see instead a fathomless formless space into which all these moments coalesce and become one great deliquescent moment?



oh give me wings
for my back,
shining wings
which seek
only virtue

mariko kitakubo

a careful dance

there's a dance - that moves so carefully and with such precision - between what we know of ourselves and what others know of us. the steps of the dance get complex when you consider all the variations, especially the most present and available of the variations . . . knowing myself through what others know of me.

the ease with which i play into that role (for that is what it is) is reminding of the fragility of my true sense of self. the very real distance and difference between how well i know myself and how well others know me is never so apparent as when i see myself let my self go and replace it with a perceived sense of self. a borrowed sense of self.

it resolves in the burning question . . . how to let go of "i"?

this dilemma and these questions are similarly expressed in this passage from an essay by jeanne de salzman, who oversaw the continuation of gurdjieff’s work after his death: “try for a moment to accept the idea that you are not what you believe yourself to be, that you overestimate yourself, in fact that you lie to yourself. that you always lie to yourself every moment, all day, all your life… you will see that you are two…one who lies and one who cannot endure lies…learn to look until you have seen the difference between your two natures, until you have seen the lies, the deception in yourself. when you have seen your two natures, that day, in yourself, the truth will be born.”

the door to freedom

when rene magritte painted "the door to freedom" in 1936, he might have been describing the shattering instant in which the distance between who a person is and who they are to be becoming is laid bare.

on the one side of the shattered window is a comfortable room.
on the other side, a grassy hill.
in the distance - the sea.

the glass shards contain elements of the image beyond the room.
the glass shards have fallen inwards creating discomfort in my room.
i am drawn to see the view beyond the window - the world beyond myself - and the shattered fragments of my understanding of that world . . . lying on the floor.

the air blows in . . . i imagine it warm and scented with grasses and wildflowers. sounds - the breeze, the rustling grasses, birds.

the light passes through the glassless window - clear and bright. it illuminates a dusty floor, the old paint on the walls. shabby curtains.

the opening in the window - like a star - pulls me through.
are those paths in the meadows?
does one lead to the sea?
i hope so.

it's a destination.
a formless destination.
broad . . . expansive . . . the opposite of this room i have lived in for all this time.

i have lived in rooms like this for most of my life. i have sought them out when paths to the ocean lay before me. those paths drew me like a moth to a light but they also frightened me. that expanse. that great unknown. so many fears, so many questions.
what is there when i arrive?
where do my rules fit? where do they go?
what happens to my expectations? what are they replaced by?

the not known often has greater power than the known.

the little rooms i have lived my life in are all labelled "what i know".

the oceans are all labelled "what i have been afraid to know".

the distance between what i know and what i am afraid to know is a measure of the suffering i have endured.

to cross the space between the two is to pass through the door to freedom.