philosophy

defiance

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

Things are getting more intense…

Sometimes it’s hard to know if the feeling of intensity are merely the effect of personal failings: Is it really circumstances that are so difficult or it is my own immature refusal to accept things as they are?

I’ve had another day of frustrations. Some things have been good but it’s wearying to find that in yet another day my places of replenishment have somehow been turbulenced and tangled.

I’m squiggling around wondering whether to give up on my beautiful hopes, if my relentless insistence on believing in the beautiful, the good, in the unfolding in certain places of something different to what has gone before, is itself the problem.

Or am I squiggling with that or just with the part of myself that is severely reluctant and unable to be dissolved by chaos? It is so utterly astonishing to me what people talk themselves into settling for.

Or am I meant to surrender? An act of humility?

The things is this: I am not seemingly called to make up abstract theories and self-hypnotising stories about why this or that has not happened, will never happen. I’m called to persevere into things that have not been seen before. And that in this world, things are needed that no-one has seen before. Or perhaps things that have been seen before, but that need to be resurrected for the current age.

I’m getting nearer to a point of breakthrough, a rip in the fabric of existence (my own at least, and since my life is part of existence, I call it ‘existence’ plain and simple). This, I’m afraid to say, almost always coincides with situations becoming more impossible. Why is this? I don’t know, but I’ve seen it before. In such circumstances, persistence in itself becomes miraculous long before whatever is being sought arrives.

A note to myself: don’t fall into self-pity. This bit is always rife with traps. Your lovely friends let you down; they didn’t realise that they were being sucked into the maelström that precedes the new. Forgive, forgive, forgive, keep going.

Something stronger, somehow than perseverance: Defiance. Dis-trust of the visible in the pursuit of the unseen. Not relying on that in which security is commonly sought.

Believing in another reality, trusting that, letting it take the weight of risk, believing.

A week to go until the daring act. Stay with it; focus.

These are the things I tell myself.

la vie suspendue en l’air

~ extraplorer ~ Leave a comment

Je suis toujours là.

(Why do I want to express this time in French? It’s so particular; a form of linguistic escape, I feel, from the everyday. And sometimes you cannot live in the same linguistic air as certain politicians; a factor perhaps in my emigrating).

Je suis toujours là in this liminal space of mid-air suspension, a mid-air that is also a depth. And stripped by illness and everyone else’s holiday plans and still being a relatively recent inhabitant and not entirely speaking the language and the violent convulsions of the pandemic of everything pressing and usual and demanding. There is a certain quality of silence. And, it turns out that this silence is allowing some deep places of myself to make themselves known.

The day is almost excessively mundane – well, perhaps ordinary is a kinder word, as playing the piano and writing are hardly mundane for me. I’m hemmed in by my depleted energy levels. So there are only quiet activities going on. Yesterday: writing, lunch, listening to a friend, pondering aloud, reading, dinner, quiet conversation with a friend (quiet as I’ve almost lost my voice, alongside the other diminishments.)

But in that quiet space something is stirring. I am encountering my own deep substance, a being of myself that I have had so little chance to be in these last frenetic months. I have reached, it appears, a truth, a tenderness of self, a deep substance of my own being, a home of sorts, perhaps. It is a work of some experimentation to capture the texture of this encounter, the purity of it and its luminosity-with-substance quality. It is perhaps – suddenly it comes to me – the substance of the ‘eternity in the hearts of men’ that we cannot fathom, written about in Ecclesiastes.

So then my silence is making a space for this luminous goodness – the luminous uncanny I now remember I once called it – to intensify. I also know that in my personal history, these moments of imposed stillness are often of great import, places of gathering ahead of some unknown moment of vast renewal.

Je suis toujours là suspendue en l’air.

And in only a few short days I have moved from wrestling to treasuring, feeling this moment as something precious to protect and defend from whatever might disturb it before it is ready.

So then here I am, writing, playing music, attending to the ordinary, trying to be humble to my humanity while eternity does its work within me.