Ways to live in your own skin here and now.
When evening comes you can see something which is pensive, hidden, reluctant to flower: that thing in matter which is allied with the kingdom of death. There is always a glow to it. And it reveals itself at the end of the day in the moment of letting go. It is like the twitch or flutter by which a liar reveals himself. Yes, it is pleasant indeed to turn away from the face of God and rest alone in your fastness
It felt as if I were looking backward in time, both here and there; recalling a memory, some things very clear and others, for unknown reasons, vaguely formed. I had a sense of mystery and good fortune yet a little disembodied, released from the immediacy of desire. I was neither body or soul but precisely both and neither. Longing was there and not there, a memory as well as an intent or purpose.
It is, perhaps, a photo of the Bardo zone, looking back on that time just before rebirth when you cannot recall what it was like to want something, and yet, even then, a vague not unpleasant disquiet leads you to choose to be reborn.
There on the other side of the bridge another life begins.
The falls was never a winter place for me; it has always been overlaid with boyhood summer adventures; playing pirate or cowboy along the creek through a forest park that seemed unexplored and vast. Last year I decided to see it in winter.
At the falls, ice limned the shapes of rushing water like a memory. There was no sparkle; the forms were unchanged, but life had gone away.
The place was private now, waiting, turned inward. Perhaps it was like married love, where aging together strips away everything that does not matter. You become aware of the wintering of flesh, hers, yours, and of her particularity. You discover how the body becomes a carnival mask, which tells you little about the person who now wears it. The girl of summer is still there, but there is winter too.
I now wear the mask of an old man, she of an old woman. Yet somehow little has changed, though nothing is the same. We can still see through the carnival disguise, and find the lover who began it all. A good dinner, talk and some wine helps
You would think an old man should be wiser. But at times I still pause when the chime strikes midnight and my mind has the thought: “How does this keep going on?”
But my heart says: “She wore a different mask years ago, and you believed it was her. Who was the fool?”
So, I have learned that once you accept that you are a fool and there is no hope for it, life opens up again. When you give up knowing things and float on the ocean of God’s foolishness you begin to trust your heart.
So that day at the falls I stood by the parapet on the overlook and suddenly, in memory, I had my cap gun holstered on my hip, ready to charge up the path on an adventure. -I felt love for that boy, his imagination, his good heart, and his delight in everything that sparkles. – Neither he nor I were going to be fooled by frozen water. The falls had on a winter mask; but lovers and the boys of summer do not believe in winter. It is a snapshot in time, no more.
What I call myself seems to have become a crowd of places and moments. The boy of summer, the young lover, the husband, the father are not gone. What has changed is that there is now a watcher behind a mask, beguiled, but not taken in. The watcher lives in every season, and no season, traveling back and forth in dream and reverie. -And grateful to have a lover for companion on this strange journey.
The waitress who serves our slice of pie when we go out for a dessert thinks we are a “cute old couple” (I overheard her saying this). -She won’t know until winter comes to her what things are possible in the winter season.
Wherever it takes place, writing seems to require you to locate a larger Self from where the words can come. -I don’t know why this is, but as long as I am somebody, nothing will happen.
So, I go out most days, and rent a table for the price of a coffee in a place where I am probably only known as ‘the old guy who scribbles.” When I encounter the familiar strangeness at the spot, I can pull off my selfhood like a sweater that is too small.
-However, in an unfamiliar cafe it is hard to resist imaging a role for myself: literary man, mysterious stranger, … I try on a series of identities, like suits, where nothing fits and each is too much or too little of something. –After a while, I realize that once again, I am seeing myself through the eyes of strangers.
How is it that after all these years, I still believe that being this particular Thomas is not enough, even though my wife claims to know otherwise (and she is very smart).
I think God has tried to write me letters on this subject, but I have a hard time accepting anyone’s word. And after all, if what She writes is true and I believed it, I would weep and the world would become utterly strange. I would have to keep asking strangers what things were called. And I would need to learn to walk once again, how to tie my shoes and boil water. It would be difficult.
But then I laugh and take a sip of coffee. I guess I will take Her word for it today, even though I don’t quite believe her.
The light expressed a musing solitude on my early morning run; regrets, pleasures, unfinished business arise. There are stark clear edges of awareness and strange evasions. And I do not quite recognize thoughts as belonging to some thing called “me.” Rather, there is a strange newborn objectivity; ideas like messages in a bottle washed on the shore, traveling from beyond the horizon of an inner sea.
Will I reform my life, answer an ad on a matchbook cover, or plan a sea journey to find mermaids? It all seems possible.
Jesus and Buddha just passed by. They were talking of, I don’t know what, but each seemed at home in the other’s company. -This has happened many times on evenings like this, when the summer day seems to reveal the arc of itself, and I perceive the turning just before day turns to night. Then, there is no reluctance, no clinging to the moment before, no rushing after the moment to come. It is easy to see that it is a perfect world and safe, as long as you do not hold onto much.
Walking through the evening light I feel I am beginning to dissolve, when I see God playing a pea and shell game down by the water while Satan stands in front of him, intent.
Quick, quick the little shells twirl under God’s hands.
“He cheats, you know,” mutters Satan. God winks and all of a sudden it does not seem important to know where the pea is. I look away toward the gilded trees and pale water. God winks again: “Very good.”
“Just one more game,” says Satan.
“But you never win,” says God.
“You cheat.”
“How can I cheat if I make the rules? “
They both vanish to continue the game elsewhere.
The golden light fills me just before it will begin to fade, and I realize that I can walk on water. I am made of light; the trees are light. Nothing but light.
I am tempted to walk across the river to the other shore, just to see how it’s done. But I decide to stay where I am; I know now that the other shore, here and there, are the same place, only different. And perhaps God will come by with new tricks after the moon rises. He knows how to find this place now.
“The fact that we cannot find a sharp dividing line between life and non-life, suggests an underlying unity, that both aspects of reality are part of a single creative process.”- Louise Young, The Unfinished Universe