"The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry." ~ Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell To Arms
"Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey sequence of bumping into's and tumblings apart."
To be naked is to be known. To be naked not in the physicality of seeing skin or to be gazed upon but rather naked inwardly, a disrobing of the soul. A soul, a human, a person without fig leaves or loin clothes to hide behind in judgment and shame. To be naked is to be vulnerable and to be vulnerable is to accept worthiness, accept love, accept acceptance. To be, rather than not be; vulnerable, loved and accepted is our birthright because we are alive.
These three gifts are are always present, patiently waiting to be believed in. True nakedness is subversive. It reveals the folly of a puritanical obsession with the prohibition of physical nudity. It is easier to cover or legislate the covering of skin than to do the psychological and spiritual work of uncovering true naked authenticity. With the manifestation of authentic nakedness - physical nakedness would loose its taboo. Even in a strip club where ample skin is available to be gazed upon, "... nudity is a costume. Some of the quest for authenticity that the customers were on was a result of this — they wanted to see that final costume drop away" (Virginia Vitzthum, G-strings and Ph.D.s, http://www.salon.com/2003/06/12/frank_7/%0A).
Is that not what we all want from our friends, lovers, family? All the costumes to drop away so our true selfs can breathe.
And in reading George Steiner, I experienced the shock of recognition. "One of the things I cannot grasp, though I have often written about them, trying to get them into some kind of bearable perspective,” Steiner writes, “is the time relation.” Steiner has just quoted descriptions of the brutal deaths of two Jews at the Treblinka extermination camp. “Precisely at the same hour in which Mehring and Langner were being done to death, the overwhelming plurality of human beings, two miles away on the Polish farms, five thousand miles away in New York, were sleeping or eating or going to a film or making love or worrying about the dentist. This is where my imagination balks. The two orders of simultaneous experience are so different, so irreconcilable to any common norm of human values, their coexistence is so hideous a paradox—Treblinka is both because some men have built it and almost all other men let it be—that I puzzle over time. Are there, as science fiction and Gnostic speculation imply, different species of time in the same world, ‘good time’ and enveloping folds of inhuman time, in which men fall into the slow hands of the living damnation?” Until I read this passage I had rather simple-mindedly thought that only I had entertained such speculation, that only I had become obsessed about the time relation—to the extent, for example, that I had attempted more or less successfully to pinpoint my own activities on the first day of April, 1943, the day when Sophie, entering Auschwitz, fell into the “slow hands of the living damnation.” At some point late in 1947—only a relatively brief number of years removed from the beginning of Sophie’s ordeal—I rummaged through my memory in an attempt to locate myself in time on the same day that Sophie walked through the gates of hell. The first day of April, 1943—April Fools’ Day—had a mnemonic urgency for me, and after going through some of my father’s letters to me, which handily corroborated my movements, I was able to come up with the absurd fact that on that afternoon, as Sophie first set foot on the railroad platform in Auschwitz, it was a lovely spring morning in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I was gorging myself on bananas." ~ William Styron, Sophie's Choice
"I know." She replied. "I can tell by the way you look at me."
"What would you do if I kissed you?"
"Kiss you back." She answered.
And then the moment slipped away into the afternoon light as we sat across from each other at the cafe content in knowing the truth. We loved and we confessed it and we knew more in those moments than many feel in a lifetime.
"You can never replace anyone because everyone is made of such beautiful specific details."
~ Celine, Before Sunrise
"I guess when you're young you just believe there will be many people with whom you connect with. Later in life you realize it will only happens a few times."
~ Celine, Before Sunset
Everything about us was true. All we went through was real and honest. Our time together is what life is - the full spectrum of emotions and experiences. No other people in relationships had it better or easier, no others were more or less in love. Any one who says that or pretends that are liars - to themselves and to each other. No relationship is ideal or without difficulties because two people are mysteries to each other and themselves - it is in the discovery of oneself and each other that we become who we can be together. We faltered and we got lost and were not able to find our way back to each other. In the fog of resentments and disappointments and the passing of time we changed as does everyone. I am sorry for my disorientation, my inability to communicate, my failure at loving in ways you needed to be loved. I miss and love you still. I don't believe that will ever go away.
Time for a little more Promised Land and a little less wilderness, time for a journey, time for glimpses of grace, time to burn down the buildings that hold in the fear, time to dismantle the institutions that kill the hope and dreams of humanity, time to re-imagine what is possible. Time for a peripatetic ecclesiology of healing encounters. Time to get on the Train of creative and inclusive community…
"In the days of the Third Age, after the fall of Gil-galad, Master Elrond abode in Imladris, and he gathered there many Elves, and other folk of wisdom and power from among all the kindreds of Middle-earth, and he preserved through many lives of men the memory of all that had been fair; and the house of Elrond was a refuge for the weary and the oppressed, and a treasury of good counsel and wise lore."
~ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
At times something inside of you shifts for no other reason than grace has broken through the stranglehold of pain. Spaces and places have profound influence, as do friends, and the stories they share. Healing comes slowly at times and is found in the moments of time which slip away and in which encounters of humanity occur. Our stories mingle and flow as grace weaves through them - the past is swallowed in the present as the future is aware of the past. This past weekend was an oasis for me as Rivendell was for Frodo on his journey after being wounded and needed to heal. I can't explain what happens when something shifts but when it does you know and life is different again.
(Healing Encounters: Music & Lyrics by Leonard Cohen, Come Healing)
I found something today on a blog I look at from time to time, Pursuing Happiness (http://thisnakedlunch.tumblr.com). There was no author attached to what was written but the words are amazing to me.
I know I am difficult and complicated to be around and my moods shift and I isolate and hide myself - even from those who are the closest to me. I believe the words I found today must be how those close to me feel. I have heard similar sentiments expressed to me or attempted to be expressed to me. The thing is I don't believe I can be different from who I am. It has taken me so long now to know who it is I am and to begin to be okay with myself. Many times I wish I were different but then I wouldn't be me and then I would be a lie.
Anyone close to me please try to understand it is not that I dislike you or not love you or not appreciate you. I assure you, I do. It is just me who has to escape and recharge and be distant at times. It must be very frustrating to watch me leave into myself. It frustrates me at times. Yet, it is what allows me to be me.
Here are the words I found today:
How to love your depressed lover?
Last night I thought I kissed the loneliness from out your belly button. I thought I did, but later you sat up, all bones and restless hands, and told me there is a knot in your body that I cannot undo. I never know what to say to these things. "It’s okay." "Come back to bed." "Please don’t go away again." Sometimes you are gone for days at a time and it is all I can do not to call the police, file a missing person’s report, even though you are right there, still sleeping next to me in bed. But your eyes are like an empty house in winter: lights left on to scare away intruders. Except in this case I am the intruder and you are already locked up so tight that no one could possibly jimmy their way in. Last night I thought I gave you a reason not to be so sad when I held your body like a high note and we both trembled from the effort.
Some people, though, are sad against all reason, all sensibility, all love. I know better now. I know what to say to the things you admit to me in the dark, all bones and restless hands. “It’s okay.” “You can stay in bed.” “Please come back to me again."
Maybe all these words I found today are saying is I need space to breath till I am okay to venture out of myself again.
