Archive | Quoth the Raving

Breathe Life In

As we move through this first week of a new year and await the results of the pivotal senate races in Georgia and Trump’s last-ditch coup attempt, I’m reminded that even when change feels too slow—or nonexistent!—it’s unfolding as it should.

In fact, change is the only true constant, and what we’re doing is impactful even when we feel isolated, ill, ineffective—thoroughly thoroughly irritated. All we ever have to do is our best, and sometimes all our best entails is breathing in, breathing out. As my teacher, the wonderful beat writer Hettie Jones, used to say: “Are you breathing, are you lucky enough?”

Sometimes breathing is miracle enough.

I don’t think I’d be feeling so sanguine if I hadn’t stumbled upon this exchange after I posted yesterday. Sanguine is actually a terrible pun, for it’s from Only Lovers Left Alive, Jim Jarmusch’s wondrous 2014 meditation on science, art, and time masquerading as a vampire film, of all things. In it, Tilda Swinton counsels depressive spouse Tom Hiddleston, who’s considering offing himself after centuries of ennui:

How can you have lived for so long and still not get it? This self-obsession is a waste of living. It could be spent surviving things, appreciating nature, nurturing kindness and friendship, and dancing.

Oh, how this struck a chord. Even at at my lowest, I’m so grateful for so much. For Grace, friends, lovers, teachers, healers, clients. For all the ways you’ve seen and supported me over these hard times. For shelter, sea, sunshine, seasons, happy synchronicities, art–especially art that inspires this gratitude.

We’ll abide, we always do, and in the meantime it’s okay to surrender to this sad stillness. The best part of us knows beautiful change lives behind it. Just: breathe.

The true definition of inspire? To breathe life in.

Sweet Stillness

And now the beautiful stillness between Christmas and New Years begins. In other years, it was a time of revelry, of endless parties and indulgence. Though my life has been too quiet in these last few months of injury and isolation, I confess I find the texture of this stillness to be different—to be magical, in fact. It reminds me of my favorite Annie Dillard quote: “We awake, if we ever awake at all, to mystery.” May this divine mystery find you.

Art: “Starry Night,” Matthew Wong.

The Feast and Famine of Being Green

Lumet’s Emerald City (lit by Oswald Morris; costume-designed by Norma Kamali).

It’s 7:30 am Sunday morning, and I’ve been up for hours.

That I rose before dawn is not uncharacteristic. But I’d planned to sleep in this morning. To bask in a morning of quiet stillness, quiet comfort after returning from a wonderful week alone in the woods of Columbia County and jumping head-long into the clamor of New York.

I spent so much of this busy weekend activated by the presence of others—in sessions with clients, then walking and dining and bedding my beau—that today I was pulled out of sleep hours before dawn, the need to process my interactions more powerful than my need for rest.

Mae Sarton has a wonderful passage in Journal of a Solitude about shutting the door to the world.

Begin here. It is raining. I look out on the maple, where a few leaves have turned yellow, and listen to Punch, the parrot, talking to himself and to the rain ticking gently against the windows. I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone…

I find that last line less ironic than simply factual. Because I do not just absorb other people’s realities. They absorb me. For me to spend time in the presence of anyone is to climb inside them, so that I am regarding the world through their senses, processing information through their nerve-endings and brain synapses. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy