Love, Joy, and Proper Behaviour: A Meditation
If life were a poem, it would be a circle. If people were a cradle, the world would be no different- when we're talking about social networks we refer to the hammock that supports us, each knot and strand shaped to a different part. It keeps us from lying in the dirt (though what sort of a metaphor is that, you ask, coming from someone so in love with dirt?) What we put into us effects us, it becomes us. Food, speech, emotion, we suck it up and, just like eating a clove of garlic, breathe it out again on our skin. It's hard sometimes to make choices about what comes out, but it becomes easier when we monitor what goes in. This sounds so analytical that it's crazy, because the feelings come up out of you and you just *do* in accordance with them and it works-- better than forcing yourself into too many things you don't like, because then things you don't like have stuck to you. Only, you must try a lot of things with an open heart, to know what you like.
I'm trying to put joy into words but I don't know that it comes clear across to you. Of course, there's very little common frame of reference societally for this feeling, for ringing like a bell with each event and person and feeling. We're great with shared anger and pain, not too bad with desire and the glut that is its fulfillment.
When there's no time to be fully aware of doing a thing while doing it, the unique and lovely character of each thing becomes dulled. There's no fullness to action, no ful-fill-ment. If I remain in Vancouver for the rest of the summer, this is what I've learned from Kelowna. If I live in Kelowna for the rest of the summer, or for my life, this is what I've learned from the last month and a half.
From the last ten years, my years of relationships, I've learned that people are what they are. To distort them by percieving them through more of your own preconceptions and fears and desires is a disservice to them and to yourself. To them, because then you leave them alone and speak to the shadow around them. There's no connection. To you, because then life becomes solitary confinement in a box of funhouse mirrors. If you are so busy attending to the way smeone's actions interact with your expectations, you have no time or attention for their actions themselves-- and a person's actions are a person, really. And a person is a wonderful complex thing that is so often a joy to behold.
This year, the most beautiful thing I've ever seen is people I love smiling. A real smile is like a flame, like sunshine in a dark place, like rain in the desert. These are not idle metaphors, because I've experienced both these things, and they are the same. They don't touch me as humanly as happiness in the face of a loved one, though. I may say this because I have known the land more frequently than I've known people, just lately, and we really do see things better when we have a little space. We may feel them better when they're closer, though? Sometimes at night I remember smiles, networks of lines crinkling big at the corner of the mouth or little around the eyes, and I am soothed.
My next lessons will be lessons of respect. For myself, for others, when there's a tie involved (and there always seems to be, somehow), respect involves behaving in an appropriate way to honour that tie. I will learn about the appropriate. It needs only a little quiet space in my head to come out, and time to come out, and a life to come out in. I will be those things, time and space and life.
Good morning.
I'm trying to put joy into words but I don't know that it comes clear across to you. Of course, there's very little common frame of reference societally for this feeling, for ringing like a bell with each event and person and feeling. We're great with shared anger and pain, not too bad with desire and the glut that is its fulfillment.
When there's no time to be fully aware of doing a thing while doing it, the unique and lovely character of each thing becomes dulled. There's no fullness to action, no ful-fill-ment. If I remain in Vancouver for the rest of the summer, this is what I've learned from Kelowna. If I live in Kelowna for the rest of the summer, or for my life, this is what I've learned from the last month and a half.
From the last ten years, my years of relationships, I've learned that people are what they are. To distort them by percieving them through more of your own preconceptions and fears and desires is a disservice to them and to yourself. To them, because then you leave them alone and speak to the shadow around them. There's no connection. To you, because then life becomes solitary confinement in a box of funhouse mirrors. If you are so busy attending to the way smeone's actions interact with your expectations, you have no time or attention for their actions themselves-- and a person's actions are a person, really. And a person is a wonderful complex thing that is so often a joy to behold.
This year, the most beautiful thing I've ever seen is people I love smiling. A real smile is like a flame, like sunshine in a dark place, like rain in the desert. These are not idle metaphors, because I've experienced both these things, and they are the same. They don't touch me as humanly as happiness in the face of a loved one, though. I may say this because I have known the land more frequently than I've known people, just lately, and we really do see things better when we have a little space. We may feel them better when they're closer, though? Sometimes at night I remember smiles, networks of lines crinkling big at the corner of the mouth or little around the eyes, and I am soothed.
My next lessons will be lessons of respect. For myself, for others, when there's a tie involved (and there always seems to be, somehow), respect involves behaving in an appropriate way to honour that tie. I will learn about the appropriate. It needs only a little quiet space in my head to come out, and time to come out, and a life to come out in. I will be those things, time and space and life.
Good morning.