Posts tagged awareness
it took me this long to realize just how broken i was during the Christmas season.
part of that is the denial one clings to while leaning precariously upon coping mechanism after coping mechanism to help one stagger through the days. part of it is shock. i have loved Christmas wholly, unabashedly, giddily all my life. childlike only in ebullience, in transparency, in glitter-strewn hope. familial strife always managed to accept hibernation’s bit in time for me to fill to brimming with timeless joy, with the love everyone else associates with Family year-round; personal tribulation always waned in the face of communal conviviality, of celebratory ceremony. even when i reeled (continue to reel) in the aftermath of heart-rending physical tragedy, peppermint-scented cheer rooted me in cozied charm, garlaned optimism, glorious vulnerability, laudable rebirth. but not this year. this year, it was everywhere but within me, and it hurt, it hurt, like scalding water striking a burn, the year’s-end spark pierced. because i finally could not be anything but devastated in the face of the rampant truth of unresolvable discord. it was so much a lie, this year, and so little of anything genuine. fully-realized was the depth of my aloneness. i have been crying it out in piecemeal ever since. i have ruined it, i fear. i awaited Christmas with such piquant desperation when younger that my dread now aches, dully, seismically. am i to lay all good to waste thusly? is awareness so deadening, so hypothermic?
My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand — and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.
The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow. I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.
–Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941)
With thanks to the Tao of Photography.
During these periods one thought enclosed everything like the blue sky of history: that it really was this and no other.
Intense love does not measure, it just gives.
The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.
As Hurricane Sandy approaches the city, New Yorkers gathered in Times Square to send our politicians and the media a message:
End the climate silence. Connect the dots between extreme weather and climate change.
NOW.
Carson combined a scientist’s ability to see with a novelist’s ability to imagine.
There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you.
Isn’t awareness fun?!
feels like it’ll be an early one tonight, although, to be honest, i’m not sure this is the kind of tired that sleep can remedy. it feels deeper than that.
and familiar, of course it’s familiar. it’s the emotional/mental equivalent of what i’ve already endured physically. let’s hope i learned the lesson my body tried so vainly to scream out as i fled the malediction.
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