Still Sundays

January 23rd.

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

Intuition is a serpent. Toni Morrison on serendipity.  “Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.” ~ Camus

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This Sunday morning I waited till it was fully lit outside before rolling out of bed for I had decided last night there was nothing to decode in the frozen darkness. It just is and you endure it. Sometimes with a frosty, unintended tear on your cheek and other moments a smile that cracks across your dry mouth.

This week I walked around my neighborhood with someone new to the area. I was a needle weaving out of ear-splitting sounds from semi-trailers lugging (un)necessary weight, cars splashing dirty snow, icy sound bites, through the stillness of trees in Morningside Park and into the mysterious silence inside and around the  Cathedral of St. John the Divine, one of my favorite places near my neighborhood.

Stillness and silence don’t always come together but when they do you can hardly find words to articulate what you understand.

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I haven’t touched my manuscript in some weeks and for the fear of being drafted into the pretentious army of all those who simply talk about writing instead of actually writing I don’t mention much. But today’s stillness is an AA meeting.  Addiction is never about the substance itself and no one really wants anonymity.

I do little things to avoid my manuscript. I type instead of hand-write which I am aware  slows me down sometimes and the pace serves as an excuse.  The ink in the pen is a transfusion of the blood in my words and I am depleted. Die.

I also feverishly work on shorter pieces for different journal submissions so as to justify my lack of attention to the manuscript.

A dear friend confronted me and said, “If you gave to your manuscript even half of what you give to “Still Sundays”, imagine…”

Imagined:  I am a tiny boat in the middle of the ocean for some weeks, without access to anyone, including my mother with whom I speak every day, my fingers are tiny oars and reaching the shore is critical for my survival.

How does one measure the middle of the ocean? Zigzag to equidistant around earthy shores or top to bottom?

There is no balanced way to do this, self. Not with this story. Roll up the sleeves. No one to blame, nothing in the way: it’s just you and the story.

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Someone was surprised by my ‘ruthless dismissal’ of another given my “compassionate, friendly, and outgoing” nature.  If I have learned anything from Marco Rojas during his arduous, mind-bending, body twisting,  spirit-shifting 90 minutes of yoga, four times a week, it is this: pain is counter-intuitive and my body knows before my mind the difference between expanding to an uncomfortable, unexplored horizon and contracting into torment. Freedom never precludes self-preservation.

Intuition is a serpent; I dance with the same rigor I can sting. My practice is solid. Carefree does not mean careless.

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This past Monday was a meteor shower of serendipitous encounters. I shared one of these exchanges on Twitter. The rest I shared with a mentor/friend over dinner. The friend smiled and said, “Ah! You are a magnet for stories.”  If I wasn’t in love with words, I could write quicker, like a thorough police report. Love holds us to a standard.

A different person upon hearing my variegated adventures from Monday didn’t understand the big deal. Had I met someone who was an agent? a publisher? owner of some famous restaurant? a celebrity that could provide access to some V.I.P. party? Although I have experienced and made all those connections too, but not that particular Monday.

“So what’s the point of all this serendipity?”

I am a brave soldier of Love but I remain cognizant this world can annihilate my sense of wonder at any moment.

“Well, it’s…cool…” I attempted to explain.

The full explanation arrived a few days later, in the words of one of my favorite authors, when by ‘chance’ I found dog-eared pages from an interview with Toni Morrison that my mother had cut out from a magazine for me in 2009.

I share below:

“What I feel most is that because I am open and available, the universe—the idea—comes to me. It feels a little like being called. […] It’s that being open—not scratching for it, not digging for it, not constructing something but being open to the situation and trusting that what you don’t know will be available to you. It is bigger than your overt consciousness or your intelligence or even your gifts; it is out there somewhere and you have to let in.

I feel more friendly when I am writing, nicer to people, much more generous, also wiser. I am full of a kind of tenderness toward people and all they  have to hide, all they have to construct. Not pity, not sympathy, just tenderness. Knowing that the job of being a human is so hard, and it is the only job there is left—though we keep on pretending otherwise.

When you think of all we are capable of—being able to love each other, and being willing to do something good in the world for no recognition…I am not saying there are not poeple who want to step over each other, who want to maim and kill, but that is a perversion of the beautiful things human beings are made for.

There are all sorts of ways people try to stay connected, try not to live in hate. Religion may be one of them, but for me the central thing is the writing. The art itself.”

Serendipity is a reminder that it’s all connected. Whether I churn great stories out of these connections or just gleefully skip along the sidewalk at the disco randomness, it matters not. Where does it all lead and what does it all mean is superfluous ego yearning to sell something that can never be bought, only felt. Serendipity is a reminder that it’s all connected. It doesn’t matter whether I am the ghost or am watching ghosts, it’s all connected.

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When one knows of what man is capable, for better and for worse, one also knows that it is not the human being himself who must be protected but, the possibilities he has within him—in other words his freedom. I confess, insofar as I am concerned, that I cannot love all humanity except with a vast and somewhat abstract love. But I love a few men, living or dead, with such force and admiration that I am always eager to preserve in others what will someday perhaps make them resemble those I love. Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, where as enslavement is a certainty of the worst. ~ Albert Camus

I am an uncompromising zealot for freedom to be—to be all your infinite selves, all the rotating fractals of your being— and serendipity is my affirmation it’s not all over:  there’s still a chance to be better.

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I have finally run out of honey, milk and nutella. I can’t dismiss groceries any longer.

Stillness interrupted.

I will hold onto this thread of stillness as I step into the day.

~a.q.s.

I am very grateful to Judy ( @jdistraction ) for gathering my string of tweets from my final serendipitous encounter on Monday night and posting it altogether as part of her Friday List and the amazing Love Project on her website.

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