what do you mean?

Well...

2 November 2007

But even as it fades, I will have this day. For today, everything has been muted. -Myself

25 November 2007

I can't stop thinking about ___. Since she died last Tuesday, everything and anything will remind me of her. I think a lot about ___, about how she died, about her family, about how she was on the phone with her boyfriend when she hit the other car, about my own friends. I think about my life and my death. I ask myself if I'm ready. I wonder why I am so upset and unsettled by the fact that she is gone. Many others have passed through my life before. Why do I find sudden death so troubling? Would I be less affected if she died in her sleep?

Am I depressed or am I simply aware? And why does it take ___'s death to open my eyes to what I know is true and would say to anyone else? Did I realize the seriousness of it all? And can we really feel this all the time? Can we be prepared all the time?

I'm scared to die unprepared. I'm afraid of forgetting again how transient it all is. I don't want to pass through this world in the moments I have oblivious to the truth and the vastness of what our lives and deaths really mean. I want always for my life to be somewhat muted to the banalities which cloud the reality almost tangible to me this moment.

I have felt more like myself this Thanksgiving weekend than I did leading up to it. School, consumerism, the world, social life . . . what does it all mean? I live my life and I love my life here. But ___ dies and I go home and I see my family and I see my friends and what has changed is the lens through which I see it all. The candle I'm burning smells something like the house did over a decade ago, and the distance between the past and the present blurs. It makes me feel like myself. I never feel more like myself than when it's all muted; when all that is left is what is real. I never want the static again.

27 November 2007

I'm still trying to hold on. I asked in my last writing two nights ago whether I am depressed or simply aware. I believe it is the latter. I already feel myself forgetting.

I thought about it more today. I've written before about feelings. I've said many times in the past that feelings are overrated. If we wait until we feel like doing what we know we should, we will rarely accomplish much at all. But I neglected to remember and contemplate other types of feeling - those not necessarily associated with inspiring action. The feelings I have now which are fading all too quickly from the forefront of my days have more to do with that "lens through which I see it all." They are not the reason for actions or the reason for what I know is right; they do not induce me to believe the truth. Instead, they are confirmation of truth.

I asked last writing, "why does it take ___'s death to open my eyes to what I know is true" and would say to anyone honestly?

I can understand so well why men and women devote their lives to religious pursuit and live closed from the world in abbeys and monasteries with fewer distractions and fewer patterns/schedules/rituals which make it nearly impossible to be always aware, always enlightened, always connected to truth.

In fact, my distrust in feelings lies in how quickly they have died after events and retreats which can never be like life; the richness of the retreat and separation from distraction allow beautiful feeling to accompany a present logic, justifying it.

I read Rilke's Book of Hours during the summer, and various others of his poems. One of my favorites I have thought about consistently these past few weeks:

If only for once it were still.

If the not quite right and the why this

could be muted, and the neighbor's laughter,

and the static my senses make -

if all of it didn't keep me from coming awake -

Before today, I loved it because it was exactly how I've felt . . . for a long time, without every being able to define it. But today - a couple of hours ago - riding the shuttle back here to my apartment, I said it in my head and suddenly realized the last line. "if only it didn't keep me from coming awake."

I feel awake. Awake is being and feeling the truth with every step. The weight of it is carried in every moment. It is the best way to feel and to live and be. Everything is more real and beautiful - it is not depressing and closed off, it is open and free and liberated.

But to be awake and not closed off from the truth, we have to close out the static our senses make - the world. The manifold of distractions. The mundane activities to which we gladly (and rightly so) devote ourselves. We have to keep living our lives, otherwise what is the point of being here? But it's such a labyrinth, life. Life - day to day life - it gets in the way of feeling what we know. Everything beautiful that I feel is remembered each time something wonderful or tragic or sudden or . . . final . . . happens. ___ is gone from this place forever. But last Monday night she was lying in her bed just like I am now. Life and death are profound and without description. They are all around us - they are us - and we breathe life and we feel it. Then we see death and we feel the brevity of it all, and we feel our own death which will come too. I am not afraid. But I am awake. It is still impossible to even imagine dying. It is what will happen when I am old and sleeping, no? I bet ___ believed that, when she gave it the passing thought that becomes customary to us all. "Some day." That day came.

Then in one vast thousandfold thought I could think you up to where thinking ends. I could possess you, even for the brevity of a smile, to offer you to all that lives, in gladness.

Rilke said it all in twelve lines. If I felt like I do - even as it fades so fast - now, I could understand so much more. I could live so much more meaningfully in my heart. And then maybe that would feed more of my action and change a life. Thoughts and feelings are not overrated - they are everything. But we cannot but discredit them because we cannot possess them long enough to depend.

I can only mute the static so much longer. But, oh! how I wish the silence would not fade.