Running and Life...

Bill Bowerman said that if one could find meaning in the absurd pastime of running perhaps one could find meaning in the absurdity of life. I have run a lot in my life & found meaning in it ~ now I have lived some & found meaning in that as well. Yet, as in running & in life there are times to step off the track to run another day. It is hard to do ~ but there are always other races to be run...and other paths on the journey of life.

Stillness...

“Sweet the sin, bitter the taste in my mouth.
I see seven towers, but I only see one way out.
You gotta cry without weeping, talk without speaking
Scream without raising your voice…” ~ U2

Stillness

A  scream and a bright light

Inception of chaotic angst

Everything keeps moving like an earthquake beneath my feet

Nothing to grasp onto

The earth opens to swallow me

I run...

 To nowhere and no one

From death and to death

The space between the two deaths

Bleeds my soul

Bleeding for meaning in the in-between times

Of unconsciousness to unconsciousness

Black heart lines

Splintered and fractured like moments dancing across the clouded sky of disbelief

Wanting to go back home (whatever home is?)

To the start of the madness

Then rewind it all and press play again like a used cassette tape

With songs of a life imprinted on it

Stories of mystical pristine abstracted memories

My life a mixed tape of uncertainty with no way to hear the music

So l look at the sky and close my eyes

Light fragments painted on the sky canvas pirouette

While poets write words of make believe

I  am pretending my soul is not bleeding

The earth has not opened up

I am not running

But at peace again

Making all the doubt inconsequential

Quieted body

No words

Stillness

I need someone who believes in me more than I believe in myself for I have lost myself somewhere along the way...

Bright Eyes ~ Shell Games...

"Distorted sounds on oscilloscopes

Distorted facts, I could never cope

My private life is an inside joke

No one will explain it to me..."

Morning ~ May 29, 2012...

“…she just vanished into a thick mist of change…”

In my own panopticon ~ intensity of sensation ~ eyes all around ~ acute awareness ~ inchoate approximations…observing beauty ~ igniting desire ~ I pull the drawstrings of a life together while I slip between the seams…

Questions...What Is The Story?

I don’t want to answer questions nor do I want answers to questions ~  I want to ask more ~ to answer a question (whatever that may mean) is simply to create more questions. The questioning is the answer to the question…to question is to begin the interpretation of being. The journey of life is itself a text; it is not in the answering but in the asking that we move. The text of the journey is an interpretive endeavor as we walk at times alone and at other times with companions we meet along the way and ask ~ what is the story we are living?

"To Be or Not To Be..." ~ What is it that makes life worth living?

"To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; Ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil…”

~ Shakespeare, Hamlet

Shakespeare asked the questions, Mark Rothko painted them and Albert Camus postulated this in Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”

To Be or Not To Be...

 If one after pondering, reflecting and struggling with this philosophical problem at the end of the day answers -yes! Yes, life is worth living! What then does this life worth living consists of? What is it that makes life worth living?

In the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen's song Reason To Believe Bruce sings:

“In a whitewash shotgun shack an old man passes away
Take his body to the graveyard and over him they pray
Lord won't you tell us tell us what does it mean
Still at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe…”

What does abundant life or simply life mean?

What in the final analysis is the determinative factor in choosing to live? Is it a lack of courage in our essential existentialism that many feign at the real prospect of death, in the ultimate act of autonomy – to take one’s life? Or is it a splendid realization of the wonder of living and to exit early would be a too difficult a choice?

I don’t know and in the not knowing there is only existing, a floating in our experiences.

Yet… the philosophical problem remains and begs for a hearing -  to be considered and contemplated…"To be or not to be..."

The Pill & The Chinese Jar...

“Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.”

~ T.S. Eliot

I took the pill today. The one I have not ingested for over a week now. The one that is suppose to make me better, okay, able to cope with my experiences day and night.

In the intervening week of abstinence from my friend Citalopram I have been dizzy, felt vertigo, my mind cloudy, lack of motivation, tasted despair, wept and wept, could barely get out of my bed each day.

When I woke up each morning I was as tired as when I fell asleep the night before.

I could feel again though, no longer numb to life. Really felt in way I do not feel while my friend swims in my blood stream, doing whatever it is she does to my neurotransmitters, altering of my biology so to inebriate my senses. I function but I do not feel, I cannot cry while she controls me.

So, I thought I would live without her for awhile, a jilted lover betrayed by her blinding of me to experience, a mist thick over my emotions, a flattening of my being.

It was as if the lid was removed from the Chinese Jar of my hermetically sealed existence, and I could breathe again, feel again, weep again, and laugh again…

Today though the top was placed back on the jar and I am again sealing myself inside where I move in stillness, apathetically apophatic. While she dances in my mind unleashing her mysterious breath that freezes and hinders my thoughts and feelings.

Guilt and Promise...

Rich’s words are how I often feel  ~ tears fall ~ oh “…exquisite fragility…” emotions unleashed ~ “Jesus wept” ~ shaking and paralyzed by vertigo of the soul…I am not as strong as I think I am ~ I need to drink from the cup of grace… we are all broken ragamuffins ~ I quiver in guilt and memories, “…bring to our (my) wounds the balm of acceptance and grace..”

Salvation through embracing forgiveness…

“That a person wants to sit and brood and stare at his sin and is unwilling to have faith that it is forgiven: [this is] also guilt in that it is a minimizing of what Christ has done.”  ~ Soren Kierkegaard, JP, §4036

 

“For no matter how many promises God has made, they are ‘Yes’ in Christ. And so through him the ‘Amen’ is spoken by us to the glory of God. “

~ Paul

In my life, this week in particular, I came to a realization or has it been a mystical revealing of something true about me. I am not sure.  Yet, this reality, this truth about me has caused me to sputter and stall and think about what it is I am doing in life and why? Then in light of why - ask now what?

I have been blinded by pain and imprisoned in liminal space. In my cell of stone and cold I scratched at the walls to create something real, to feel pain in my fingertips, to watch them bleed - to know that I have not fully died. My scratching, my yearning for help has only been muffled by the prison of isolation within my own thoughts, I attempted, “…to scream without raising my voice…” – polite insurrection and compliant subversion within my prison.

What is this prison, this construct of escape and perceived safety?

Guilt…it is guilt…a most unkind task master, dark warden of my will.

My thoughts have been inverted in their focus while experiences incessantly tumble from past to present and roll to a stop in this ever present moment of incarceration. I run with arms flaying in fear and going nowhere chased by distraught madness. Disequilibrium, vertigo of soul, a black hole of guilt that is my tower of self aggrandizement to deflect my unwillingness to be set free. My running has been in vain for I have gone nowhere. I am, "Running forward into death..." as Heideggar wrote.

I run to be noticed by others, to be something in their eyes, to set myself apart, to be special so I can feel good about myself. This I do to assuage my guilt for all that is in past, all that has made me what I am. Afarid of myself and the shadow of my being. All the while not knowing what it is that I want to be…I run dizzyingly drunk and hallucinating like a night of Absinthe consumption – green dreams of ethereal serendipity, phantoms of promise that die in the mist of consciousness.

So, my guilt…in whom I am as a human being eats at me, my cancer of being. Rotting rancid gangrene flesh on the floor of my cell, suffocating on plans I continually make but never realize. 

My plans...all attempts to be what I believe others want me to be, to be something in others eyes that I am not in my own. An actor, a hypocrite on the stage of life, speaking in a staccato of lies and denial. In all of my doing the guilt is not vanquished and what was once only a trap is now my gallows.

In this place I find myself, I know it is a denial of Jesus, a denial of the resurrection, as I live as though I am dead, in a grave while I still breathe.

I yearn to be free, to see more than glimmering light through the crack in the wall that is my window – I long for a kiss that will heal me, a touch on an arm, an embrace so authentic that there is a release, an exodus, a liberation that will be like a surreal suspension of time infused with warm love as cleansing as a spring rain.

My drug, my addiction, is attempting to prove I am something I am not – I am "…running to stand still…" I feel the "...needle chill..." each time I am praised for something I am not and pride fills my veins as the needle drops to the floor and I become numb to living once again.

Muse...

Always pause and drink at an oasis...

                                 

“We don't have a language for

the senses. Feelings are images,

sensations are like musical

sounds.” ~ Anais Nin

“The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is

used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses

walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to

ecstasy.” 

~ Anais Nin

 “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”  ~ Anais Nin

“Life notes ~ poetic memories ~ mystical spiritual sensual moments...”

May 20th, 2012...

"Being apart and lonely is like rain.
It climbs toward evening from the ocean plains;
from flat places, rolling and remote, it climbs
to heaven, which is its old abode.
And only when leaving heaven drops upon the city.

It rains down on us in those twittering
hours when the streets turn their faces to the dawn,
and when two bodies who have found nothing,
dissapointed and depressed, roll over;
and when two people who despise eachother
have to sleep together in one bed-

that is when loneliness receives the rivers..."

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Loneliness

“O hour of my muse: why do you leave me,
Wounding me by the wingbeats of your flight?
Alone: what shall I use my mouth to utter?

How shall I pass my days? And how my nights?

I have no one to love. I have no home.
There is no center to sustain my life.
All things to which I give myself grow rich
and leave me spent, impoverished, alone. “

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet

It Is True...

“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” ~ Samuel Beckett

“…an immense and aching solitude.” ~ William Styron

Do I take a pill to alter my mind’s chemistry and not feel or not swallow it and feel the intense pain well up inside of me? What is real?

“My gentle and mild being through thy ruthless fury
has turned into a raging hell that is not from here.
Quite pure, quite free of future planning, I mounted
the tangled funeral pyre built for my suffering,
so sure of nothing more to buy for future needs,
while in my heart the stored reserves kept silent.”

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

(Mark Rothko)

It is true

All of it

Everything she said to me

Anyone who really knew me would hate me:

I am a horrible husband

I am a horrible father

I am moody

I am depressed

(Mark Rothko)

I am awful

I caused her to find someone else

I am following a wrong empty path

I am lazy

I am unlikable

I am a mess

I am a burden

I am unkind

I am selfish

I am

Lost...

Floating on an ethereal sea of emptiness

Into a dark cavernous void

I want to shut my eyes and never wake

Reality is too cruel a friend

An abyss of loathing contempt

I sink as into a pit of quicksand

Suffocating and pulling me deeper

Into blackness

And death

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”

~ Albert Camus, Myth of Sisyphus

Today and a long time ago...

Three...

3

Three

Years

Trinity

Three on my arm

What does three mean

To me

To someone else

To anyone

A number

An odd prime

Triad, trio, tritone, trinity

Wholeness, harmony, radiance

Unity, truth, goodness

Body, soul, spirit

Husband, wife, leman

Father, Son, Spirit

Mother, Daughter, Spirit

Tattoo

Metaphor

Symbol

Three spheres

Aesthetic, ethical, religious

Three years

Pain, tears, vertigo

Lost, found, liminal

Exploration, journey, ambiguity

Loss, depression, anxiety

Angst, uncertainty, doubt

Paralysis, collapse, death

Smiles, joy, peace

Friends, family, lovers

Reading, writing, creating

Drinking, dancing, discussing

Three years

Why, why, why

Hmm, hmm, hmm

Three

<3

Exposed Shoulders...

Exposed shoulders ~ bared to sunshine

~ to touch…

I Hope...

I hope to do some good

Lighten some burdens

Find a way to forgive myself and others

To be alive and breathe

Canvas...

Most ~ if not all of life is not interpreted well.

“We had the experience but missed the meaning,

And approach to the meaning restores the experience

In a different form, beyond any meaning

We can assign to happiness.”

~ T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages

Depth of penetration like light into darkness

Creating inside a body

An ache longing for liberation

Behind the eyes of imagination

Passions delicately seep

Dripping like morning dew

To the blank page from infinitude

Recapitulation of time and meaning

Layered interpretation without context

Fragments of truth and reality in an aesthetic captured betwixt being and non being

Life writ large on the canvas of the artists mind

Anticipating humanity stepping into the experience

She dances with color and exposes our nakedness

Incredulity at her brushstrokes

Fragility in finitude

Exposed breathless beauty in darkened skin

Lips touch lips

Life’s first kiss

Breath and eyes open to see love

She is all in all and her brush is set down

Resting to let her creation be

Light flickering as the image dances

The first shadows of reflection fall

Art is life

Creativity is being

She is becoming