Still Sundays

December 5th.

The energy of intention. To be inspired  is an art. Anaïs Nin.  D.H. Lawrence. Art as the umbilical chord to that unknown.

If you would like to know what Still Sundays is about, please take a quick gander here and just read the third paragraph. Thanks.

When I don’t wake up at 4 a.m. or 5 a.m. on  a Sunday morning so as to gently touch that space between darkness and light, it means it must be December. It is December in New York. I don’t hate it.

I was in South Africa this time last year with heroes and cowards. But it was in December 2008 when I told New York:  no more of you and I in winter. It wasn’t even unbearably cold. But I was. So I concluded a hiatus from New York was long over due.

I am here now and the city is beginning to freeze over. Knuckles are chilled within minutes but I am still warm somehow.

New York City is a big litmus test for your internal state of affairs. An emotional scan. A spiritual, mental, physical x-ray of where you are.

I am here New York and I still love you. My thermostat says I am in love with the life I am living, even when I don’t quite understand how it is unfolding, so I can’t read your frigid temperatures accurately.

When I don’t wake up to write, words start knocking louder and louder till I offer them the keys—my finger tips—to type or hold a pen and enter a dimension that stretches between now and beyond. Beyond is not necessarily the future. Beyond is a crystal ball.

What can I see…

It is marvelous to have someone make you tea while you are writing or working on a project. This is especially true when you have forgotten you have been sitting there for hours. You haven’t been forgotten entirely. The dried, crushed leaves of the tea plant bagged in boiling water (with or without milk) warm you in more ways than you anticipate.

Someone said I wear my soul upon my sleeve. “Be careful.”

It reminded me of Shakespeare’s Othello:

“But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at: I am not what I am.”

I haven’t even shared a complete work of fiction in the form of a novel and my words have become a trial against myself.

Despite the disappointments, given human frailty, in the form of judgments about who I am, I am unaltered by the crusade against “figuring me out.”

As long as my heart knows when to no longer give benefit of doubt, I offer both sleeves.

We are more than what we think, let the soul wave.

This stillness where I swim on Sunday mornings is not always available to me and neither is it silent.  Marco Rojas says in yoga, as does my diverse upbringing, ‘intention is everything’. My intention when I began these still sundays, long before I had a website, was to go swimming, without wearing much, to the deep shores within and through the overlooked stillness of New York. Now the beach is public and some people are clothed and want to stare and understand me without bringing an understanding about themselves.

There are five statements that are posted on the cork board above my desk (although I don’t always sit and write at my desk) and one of them is my author’s statement: I write to understand and be understood.

Intention is a sculpting of an energy that materializes instantly. What is my intention with these still sundays? I just want to swim, float, go under, come up for air, and stare at the sparkling sun on the water that no one can quite touch but we we feel anyway.

I read Anaïs Nin’s essay on D.H. Lawrence, “D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study,” and there is a part where she compares the works of William Blake and D.H. I am familiar with both but this perspective was new.  I share below:

When William Blake was constructing his world he made no attempt to exteriorize his own imaginings in his own life; he knew that the time had not come. His life would have been a failure, and unconvincing. His poetry and prose had been flung out beyond his own boundaries, to future generations. He was content to live as others did, to go on perfecting his prophecies and his visions.

The very nature of Lawrence’s philosophy, on the other hand, forbade any attempt on his part at detachment. His convictions were the emanations of a life deeply lived through all its failures and contradictions. He was personally involved….he would not evade the last test of his sincerity. He gave of his own blood.

The denial and detachment of Blake is a sacrifice. But so is the giving of blood.

All who create are personally involved. I haven’t even started bleeding.

To inspire and be inspired is an art form of which we are all capable. We don’t even have to draw, write, snap, or strum; simply sharing that which moves us suffices. As long as we are stimulating each others’ sensibilities in a swift and abrupt tango between it doesn’t have to be this way and it is indeed this way, we are making love to our human condition gone mad. So share on.

Nothing is about you and therefore everything is.

I live in the beyond. I swim upstream into stillness that can only be found in the present—where I have the beyond and the now.

“However smart we be, however rich and clever or loving or charitable or spiritual or impeccable, it doesn’t help us at all. The real power comes in to us from the beyond. Life enters us from behind, where we are sightless,  and from below, where we do not understand. And unless we yield to the beyond, and take our power and might and honor and glory from the unseen, from the unknown, we shall continue empty.” – D.H. Lawrence

I am very blessed to have family and friends who love me unconditionally without regard to understanding all aspects of me. There is no substitute for that kind of love.

And yet…

It is ecstasy to be understood. It is going to the bottom of the ocean without feeling the pressure of gravity against your ears. It is free-falling not under but above the force of gravity.

But yet…

Love remains long after those who share understanding of moments are gone.

I still remember the first person who contacted me after my very first post—long before I had a Twitter account. It was a deeply heartfelt exchange, followed by a few more. I wrote as if for her only. And then I evolved and I am sure she did too.

I have been that reader too. A website or monthly column in a magazine that I could never miss. And then, months have passed and I haven’t even looked at what I used to read religiously.

We grow. We are supposed to.

Whatever we keep coming back to, in love or art—however frequently or infrequently—is the umbilical chord to that unknown.

Thanks to Marco Rojas, my yoga instructor, and V.G., a mentor, teacher, and friend, I am not afraid to take the “power and might and honor and glory from the unseen, from the unknown” and firebreathe exhale into the stillness of now.

If you are still enough, there is not much to fear in the now.

I will never be empty. And I am no longer afraid of that.

In this still now.

~a.q.s.