Still Sundays
November 28th.
Spiritual vampires. “love is worth nothing until it has been tested by its own defeat.” galaxy that is the soul.
If you would like to know what Still Sundays is about, please take a quick gander here and just read the third paragraph. Thanks.
This stillness from where I write peels layers. Of New York City and myself. New York City—this breathing, reactive, organism in and of itself—seems a bottomless chasm where exploring can never end.
New York City is notorious for having uncharted terrain despite one living here a lifetime. So what can stillness bring to the fractures, crevices, openings that are within me?
Some mornings stillness anchors me to the peaceful bottom of the ocean within where I neither float nor swim but the gravity inside me suffices to gather the spool of spinning.
Someone from once upon a time ago crackled into my current reality to say they missed how “everything mattered” to me. When this individual understood my silence to mean that I had indeed taken the comment not as a compliment but what others have often critiqued, the person offered their words like balm, “Everything doesn’t—and can’t—make sense, but everything does matter.”
I managed an “Oh” that vaporized into this cold November.
An arraignment for making sense. Sometimes I am the defendant. How does one plea-bargain with the past?
At least since this storytelling lifestyle I now have carte blanche on my obsession for detail.
My grandfather used to call me a hummingbird when I was nine or ten. “Not a butterfly. A hummingbird.” Like bees, hummingbirds are able to assess the amount of sugar in the nectar they eat; they reject flower types that produce nectar that is less than 10% sugar and prefer those whose sugar content is stronger.
I need to survive amongst spiritual vampires running away from their own light. I can’t help but seek those whose spiritual sugar is oozing.
But can someone scan the speed I am flying?
Hummingbirds flutter so fast they appear still. Maybe this stillness is just a figment of my imagination, after all.
Learning the law was not a mistake. Yet I remain wedged in between the hairline space of my current lifestyle that consists of writing and a past consisting of law and education. The more I write the more clearly I can sense a continuum. Learning the law alters one’s perception permanently. The world is a grid with multiple chess games happening simultaneously. Justice, a whispering conscience, is a byproduct.
For someone who writes, emotions are the thermos for keeping empathy and sentiments alive. The training in law doesn’t allow much room for that because emotions demand vulnerability.
I finally have the grip of both reins but only when suspended in stillness can I coast the gallops.
Stillness is a conscious effort.
I read magazines from back to front. I don’t really know why; I always have. A magazine, unlike a book, doesn’t per se reveal an anticipated “ending,” so it is not quite curiosity that makes me do this. I suppose going about this way slows my browsing momentum given I do read fast, especially when I have had a chance to explore the cover or front page revealing content and reading becomes the holy grail.
I don’t do this with books. However, I have noticed the aforementioned approach with non-fiction books for the last year. I will read the last chapter, then open somewhere in the middle, then the beginning, then back to the second last chapter, etc. I have lost all ability to function linearly. I am grateful I make it to Marco Rojas’s yoga on time.
Last week I opened to the last page of V.S. Naipaul’s The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief. I accidentally stumbled upon it at the Barnes and Noble bookstore; someone had left it where I sat. I was not familiar with V. S. Naipaul, a Nobel Prize winner.
In the last few pages, V.S. Naipaul mentions a book called My Traitor’s Heart by Rian Malan. Moreover, Naipaul shares how My Traitor’s Heart ends with a parable. The couple in this parable are Neil and Creina Alcock.
I begin the part where Creina is speaking:
“‘If you’re really going to live in Africa, you have to be able to look at it and say, ‘This is the way of love, down this road: look at it hard. This is where it is going to lead you.’”
This is the resolution of this marvelous book [My Traitor’s Heart]. It is not easy to accept. Perhaps the problem is that “Love” is not defined. Without that definition it is hard to follow Creina when she tells Rian Malan, ‘I think you will know what I mean if I tell you love is worth nothing until it has been tested by its own defeat.'”
“love is worth nothing until it has been tested by its own defeat.”
“love is worth nothing until it has been tested by its own defeat.”
“love is worth nothing until it has been tested by its own defeat.”
Someone please define Love universally for we all know defeat.
When I have asked the apothecaries, those who appear to have mastered the fine art of love, to offer the elixir, they dispense words akin to chemistry, commitment, luck, choice, effort, so much so there seem to be as many potions as doctors.
Love is a gut feeling and you just run with it. But you need two legs to run.
The two legs need to make certain they are not running away but towards. And towards what?
Love constantly itself evolves as it transmutates those involved for that is what love does: it begins transformations the moment you step inside its lair. Strand that remains unaltered is the art of spiritual affinity of which you are not the creator.
The unfolding of the unintelligible what is and what remains is the indefinite definition of love.
I am startled and overwhelmed by serendipity and synchronicity (the two are not the same) when they happen simultaneously. This Vast Mystery is ever keen on reminding me that I am only a co-captain of this spaceship, even if I am the master of the dialogue with the galaxy that is my soul.
Awe is my initial reaction, followed by humility. Every.time.
Who is the ventriloquist?
Fusion of serendipity and synchronicity can’t do anything if you are not ready to receive the universe subsidizing on your behalf. We are more fearful of getting what we want than losing that which we don’t have to begin with.
In stillness we can hear the echo of a deep seated truth and when one is that still, there is nothing else to do but run with it.
On this still Sunday in DC, I read your writing and feel pleasure and knowledge course through my senses.
And remembrance. A hummingbird does flap its little wings so fast as to seem standing still in place. Once when I was in Jamaica, I visited a woman known to locals as Hummingbird Lady. She gave me a little bottle of sugar water and took me to her garden. She told me to stand very still and hold out the bottle. I did, and before too long a hummingbird came to drink from the tip of the bottle. I could see its wings buzzing rapidly, holding it aloft as it drank. Beautiful.
As is this piece. So much truth in the sentence that we are fearful of getting what we want. Yes, it’s necessary to be ready to receive the subsidizing of the universe on our behalf.
Something I didn’t know I wasn’t ready for until now.
Must rectify.
Thank you, Annie.
Once more I find common ground with you here. 🙂 Thank you.
Dear Annie ~ your #StillSunday pieces are becoming my weekend meditations! I love dancing through your words and feeling a certain amount of peace and truth in all of them. ~ thank you ~
i reserve the right to comment on this post at a later date. heh. *hugs*
Dear Annie,
Reading this was like taking a slow and gentle meander through a garden, admiring a flower here and there. Only when I finished reading did I become aware of the path that was implicit in the journey. Profound truths, deeply experienced and beautifully told.
very beautiful choice of words,so well weaved it amazes me to read words and able to see them as colors of a painting…which is alive and radiates its emotions…i feel like naming it painting in words,a new media for future.
I so needed to read this today and made a date with myself that I would not go to sleep tonight without coming here and being still with your thoughts and mine.
I’m glad I did.
Thank you Annie — you are a beacon.
Submitting comment on Monday’s still morn. I read “My Traitor’s Heart” more or less when it first came out together with Rushdies “Satanic Verses”, reading both lying on the grass or under a tree in Durban’s Botanical Gardens. Have always laid claim to have read botanical verse in Durban’s satanical gardens (at that time). This Still Sunday entwines many enthralling crucial thoughts also at the center of Naipaul’s works in deciphering and questioning what we are “running towards”, but I’ll finish my comment if I may with a *hug*.
@ Marisa—thank you for sharing that beautiful story about the hummingbird woman you met. the imagery stays with me as if my own memory.
@kari—happy to share this space with you.
@naoimi—a meditation? ha! well, if that is what it is then I think I finally got meditating right! : ) thank you for dancing along the madhatter.
@ Vaughn, your comment captures how I often walk, when just lost between dreams and this earth. thank you for sharing this journey—stillness—with me.
@nayla—your comments are always so encouraging and for that I am so grateful. thank you for being so positive and being you.
@becky—thank you for making the time to read. and comment. i know this much about beacons, they just stand, it is you that decides to stop, so for that you are the real courageous light. thank YOU for sharing stillness with me.
@Simon—Wow—“botanical verses in Durban’s satanical gardens” nails Durban in so many ways, still.
I was told to pick up Naipual’s travel writing a long time ago when someone read my piece on South Africa on here. I was embarrassed to say I had never heard of him. So when this incident happened by pure chance, I was really taken
aback. Not only did I not realize WHO he was and HOW great but….you know how it goes. One really doesn’t know what to make of being compared to others. I suppose that is the nature of the business of writing and perhaps human nature: we can only understand in relation.
And that is WHAT is frightening, even if we are running towards some kind of LOVE, without knowing how to define that love, we remain at a loss.
I do have other thoughts on Rushdie–having read Satanic Verses and Midnight’s Children—given I am not really a fan of his, actually. But that is for later.
I appreciate all of your comments and support.
~a.q.s.
@
I read magazines back to front, browse non-fiction the same way, and eat hamburgers upside down in both hands. Last month I saw a sparrow hover like a hummingbird, but it didn’t hover long. For most, I’m just that sparrow. For a few, very few, I am more of a falcon, carrying things up and outward, tearing into the flesh of the words to find what lies within. Such books, such friends, suffer a much for my love.
…and you do run with it, each and every time, in a way that continues to still me in your expansiveness. when i first started following you in twitter i said you stand apart from the masses. you do. thank you for doing the work and then choosing to share it with us. peace.
“Learning the law alters one’s perceptions permanently.” I used to think that studying psychology–in my case, reading lots of journal articles, designing experiments in perception and cognition–had knocked the poetry out of me completely. But what kind of cognition did I study?–cognition of sonata themes with repeated listening, story structure, fractal repetition in the poetry of Wallace Stevens. I begin to see that it would take much more than graduate school to cleave away a poetic turn of mind. We can’t help being altered, but it is so clear from what you write that your hummingbird perceptions are intact. How wonderful to have learned, as well, how to listen for the “whispering conscience” of justice.