to really understand is divine
Still Sundays.
November 6th.
No matter how many times I write about New York City it is not enough. Not enough for me and not enough for those who just don’t see what I see.
Rage is a bull and I am a champion rider who neither tires easily nor plans on retiring. At best I can tame the beast with humor. But I find cynicism easy and eventually boring; therefore, I take whatever it is that I don’t understand by the horns: the spleen wants to spit.
That being said I never write when I am angry. I can create a fury of words that can dissolve the deads’ bones, but actually write?—never. I don’t even “journal” such thoughts for I know and have seen the consequences of my giving life to thoughts with words. Not that I have ever had a journal, at least not in the sense where I had any real expectations of no one ever reading it! Rule: If it’s written, someone is bound to come across it. Believe it; accept it.
These thoughts by author Toni Morrison on anger and writing resonate close to my process.
“Anger … it’s a paralyzing emotion … you can’t get anything done. People sort of think it’s an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling —- I don’t think it’s any of that —- it’s helpless … it’s absence of control —- and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers … and anger doesn’t provide any of that —- I have no use for it whatsoever.”
I woke up this Sunday morning at 5:oo a.m.—without an alarm—with a resolve to accept my decision from last night to no longer write today. In fact I had told my mother last night I don’t think it is a good idea to continue with this online sharing of my Still Sunday thoughts. I told her I needed to focus on my novel which will now be an even slower progress given a much needed full time job around the corner awaits. There goes the final excuse for not finishing fiction and other such thoughts were gladly pushed aside.
Usually when I wake up this early on a Sunday morning to check the temperature of Stillness (it’s always the same, some immeasurable constant), which feels like a conversation with the Sun (I am the listener; there is no interpreter), I eventually begin writing after a few cups of tea. Some Sundays the costume of some designated scribe feels a bit tight but eventually I am warmed up. Not today. 8:oo a.m. 9:oo a.m. 10:oo a.m. 11: oo a.m. It wasn’t that I had nothing to say. Oh I had spitfire rage about many things I was struggling to comprehend, including applause for the sake of desperate connecting at the expense of encouraging mediocrity. It was just that I had nothing new to say to myself.
Then to realize I had ‘gained’ an hour. Time had shifted. I cursed Time: Time changed without changing me.
Then my mother called. You really didn’t write? No I didn’t and I wasn’t going to. She said she supported me if that is indeed what I had decided was best for my fiction and well-being. She just wanted to remind me that I never wrote for other people. I was always that kid that was very happy playing with her imaginary friends.
I thought of my yoga instructor Marco Rojas who is often saying, “Be a kid so you can be a better adult.”
But kids also throw tantrums. I had thrown one last night. It didn’t help.
She hung up and I sat there. I thought about my yoga practice. Sometimes the “bliss” is not available as quickly even though you are doing your best. Marco Rojas says you have to work for it. The resistance in the mind seeps into the joints and the body can only experience the blissful high to the extent the Intelligence can fly over the mind and it can’t do that without the body. Mind-body: chicken-or-the-egg. Bliss is a frittata: who cares what came first but you still have to take the time to cook.
Sometimes, depending on the level of mind-body resistance, it can take the entire 90 minutes to finally get a tiny glimpse of bliss! Bliss being the point where the body finally shuts the mind out so Intelligence can understand what is real, what matters.
I was going to stay in the grinder of Stillness as long as it took to expectorate rage from the lungs of love.
Somewhere in the world there is a man and woman who want to believe in a nice world where people are just “stupid” and not intentionally conniving, manipulative, and desperate. I am not that woman or man. I forgive often, mind little, but if I can sense intentional actions then I feel obliged to hold people to the standard of mindfulness.
I know I come across as someone who can walk away from anything and anyone. That is because I can. That is because I have. This doesn’t mean I didn’t care when I did care. This doesn’t mean it was ever easy. This doesn’t mean another might not be hurt by my walking away or continue to feel as if they are somehow inadequate by my decision to no longer engage. But I will never compromise what doesn’t feel right. And sometimes in order to discover what doesn’t feel right one has to go on a quest to understand. Where most people throw in the towel and check out, I try even harder. This quest to understand comes at an exhausting price and can cost relationships. But Lord only knows what’s in my and my siblings’ DNA: we are relentless seekers to understand for our own self. I am lucky enough to have been blessed with an extreme abundance of unconditional love from my mother and, despite our tumultuous tit-for-tat flares, my father is a rocksolid supporter of my decisions.
Carl Jung wrote, “What we do not make conscious emerges later as fate.” It is through my interminable quest to understand—fully cognizant that there is much that will remain beyond my comprehension (not to mention there will remain concepts beyond the realm of human articulation even if understood)—that I become more conscious and sometimes the price for that consciousness is to move forward, alone, without many good, kind, talented people I have known.
Mama you are right, but only because I have your unconditional love.
What power: Love!
Stillness: where you gather around to shed the non-living for that which will never die.
If you can stay there long enough (on and / or off the mat), you are bound to understand so as to emerge to create whatever you want.
That’s divine.
To really understand so as to gain a truly new perspective is some divine energy where no fear resides. And with that kind of understanding you can (re)direct the course of your life.
Great thoughts. I do journal when I’m angry and sad and happy and clear and cloudy… It’s more of a personal therapy time, I think. I don’t use many of those thoughts in my writing but they come in handy in understanding my own actions. Thank you, as always, for this stillness.
hello becky. thanks for stopping by and your thoughts. i DO use many of my still sundays’ thoughts & other thoughts written or spoken elsewhere for my writing fiction but only after i have understood them and sometimes it takes awhile.
i appreciate you take note that despite such thoughts here Stillness remains.
sidenote: and i don’t think any author wants to write for “himself” or “herself” and my stating so was not an assertion that I don’t want an audience for my fiction. everyone does to some extent. that was one of the primary reasons i did start my website, that and to share articles i find via others with a few of my own comments here and there. sharing still sundays was a different matter and it will always be personal first.
~a.