Still Sundays

January 2nd.

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

Last tango with truth. 1/5th of a second to fall in love? Sublime Flux.

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The only sound that can be heard on the farmhouse this Sunday morning is that of abrasive winds. A windstorm. No thunder, lightening, ice, snow, or rain, just gale-force winds. The house is still as if inside the eye of an invisible storm. That is a loving home after all: creating a stillness out of the deck of issues inside yet keeping the maddening corrosion outside.

It is as if the strong winds came just to help us depart. It’s time. Christmas vacation is over. The siblings and their respective spouses must return to their homes in different cities and states.

It’s a new year that won’t feel quite new till March although the cosmos has indeed been reset.

Of all elemental forces, I am most sensitive to wind. Yes, I don’t like the harsh cold, but wind—anything more than usual—feels most stubborn and I have to listen. To something.

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I had an exchange with someone with whom I am not close but we do have a creative camaraderie. I trusted this individual enough to admit that the fiction story they had just read was my least favorite and I disliked it very much but somehow I remained drawn to it. They kindly responded that this was probably because it was so far from truth and I should write more from real life experiences.

That is the only story I have written where I told two characters’ story exactly how it happened. I didn’t make up a single fact. This at first made me giggle but was eventually followed by a fleshy sadness I couldn’t quite articulate.

Many before me have said this so I might as well place it  in quotations: ‘We write fiction to tell the truth.’ Or at least some version of truth.

While updating my website I reviewed some old articles and posts. I discarded some and kept others without regarding if it had been read. I don’t want it, it goes out.

I came across a post on September 21, 2009 where I wrote something I have long known:  saying you want to write the truth is like saying you want to take a picture of infinity. All truths are distorted when captured.

Yet, as if I had no clue who thought or wrote the aforementioned words, I was out with a search warrant for some version of truth again on November 25th, 2009, this time in Johannesburg, where I wrote:

As I work on my three different “writing projects,”  I can’t help but wonder, regardless if it is  “fiction” or “non-fiction”: what is “truth” and why does it matter…or to what extent does it matter when there exists a story ‘begging’ to be told from anyone’s perspective? The biggest lies being the ones we tell ourselves, not just to be able to sleep at night, but to live with the choices we make. The human brain’s ability to justify and rationalize any action is incredible.

For now I will stick to what Hemingway said, “Write the truest sentence you can possibly write.” I think that might serve to preserve the integrity of one’s intentions regardless of the “truth” of the matter attempted to be told.

Someone left a comment that stays with me, “Regardless of what it is that we remember, Love remembers what we forget.”

This obsession with some truth—big “T”, small “t”,  italicized, bold, or underlined—it matters not which brand but just truth:  I go in circles except I am not chasing my own tail.

“Love takes up where knowledge leaves off,” wrote Thomas Aquinas.

This year as I wrap up my manuscript’s first draft to be handed to an editor I resolve to write with love because Truth is a Golden Rock* that seems to defy gravity, as it perpetually appears to be on the verge of rolling down the hill.

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While browsing through one of my mother’s magazines I came across the following on the bottom of the page not quite related to any article:

1/5 of a second. That’s how long it takes to fall in love, according to new data from Syracuse University. In that split second, researchers say, 12 areas of the brain work together to release euphoria-inducing chemicals such as dopamine, oxytocin, and adrenaline.

One fifth of a second. To fall in love. To possibly do something stupid, something brave, something life altering, something vulnerable, something meaningful, something meaningless.

Falling in love may feel without choice but to love is a choice that demands effort and responsibility.

There is no measure for how long it takes to fall out of loving.

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I began last January with concluding that we are in a state of sublime flux, a series of perpetual transitions, and was grateful to begin 2010 with the knowledge, as I understood then, about the purpose of being strong. This excerpt from what I wrote last January I begin with a quote found in a book:

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.”

Right then and there—despite not having done any yoga in 6 months*—the past two years of practice where Marco, my favorite yoga instructor, would repeatedly say to the packed class, “We all want the freedom to BE,” finally made sense beyond the realm of my body twisting and sweating further and farther than imagined limits. He would usually say this just when our strength was to give way to collapse.

Once we begin to gather pieces of that which is indestructible about us we float in an unparalleled freedom.

A freedom begotten from the knowledge that we are at once nothing and more than what we think we are. The freedom to essentially just Be while we Become into that Being we have always been which serves as a steadfast zephyr despite perpetual transitions.

A freedom borne out of settling with the responsibility of choices we make. It matters not if the choice is more or less noble/dignified/courageous as compared with another, better or worse in hindsight, right or wrong despite insight, but to have the courage to sit with that choice regardless for whom (yourself or another) you do what you do. Ultimately, to recognize, that you exercised choice where you could.

In 2010 I hope you and I are even “stronger” so as to gather even more pieces of our essence which set us free.

Here is to discovering what we are made of through the choices we make with the help of those we hold dear.

Every choice I made in 2010 was intentional (even when not calculated), but for two. That’s pretty good, I say.  Having discovered blocks that have shown me what I am made of in 2010, given what I endured in 2008 and 2009, now I plan to build with these blocks. I want to dance with grace between yoga postures and all that comes in 2011. I am going to breathe between the spaces of transitions where only my perception distorts the continuum.

It’s all really unfolding just how it must so we can be who we have always been: to swim in freedom so as to serve and share so others can do same.

Happy gliding in 2011.

~a.q.s.

*Golden Rock is better known as Kyaiktiyo Pagoda in Myanmar and I wish to visit it soon.

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