Made of Stone, Thinking, Choices, Identification of Behavior

The thing with this is, due to true experience, I can smell it sooner. This is good. This is also bad, reacting, while it can save my life, can also have me seeing zebras when all that is present is white and black. Maybe this is all still me on the inside when I am screaming and I think that expression is making it to the outside and being erased, I am wrong. Sometimes keeping my side of the street clean looks a LOT like giving others excuses for their own behavior, a lot like enabling abuse. I wish for strong people around me who can handle when I need to blow up and use music to speak more loudly for me and to forgive me when I am mistaken.

I wonder how many times someone makes a choice to give up a thing they wish to express to me because they do not wish to weigh upon me. I am quite sure that it happens. The thought makes me glad and full of sorrow at once that I might inflict what has me feeling like nothing, upon another who is giving me the gift of them.

I wonder if this too, is just life. If the process isn’t to an end, how is there balance? I’ll be rather angry and laugh if the answer is like what I hear in my head. It’s like the law of large numbers.

I REALLY HATE BEING INVISIBLE. and yet, I really like being invisible. If I cannot work that out, how the hell can I expect someone else to do so. Bad, bad form Elisa!

Morning Trip (100)

“Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole….”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays and Lectures

**Click this line to View the essay in its entirety.

Morning Trip (83)

Normally, I do not write as myself on the Morning Trip posts. I’ve been feeling a slow-down, which might be a speeding-up, here. I’m working very hard and getting nowhere. I’m doing nothing and making leaps. I do not think in myself, that I can tell. I know that it is all ok. I feel really NOT ok! Many thoughts about what I found this morning, and then even suggestions for music for me, had selections dealing with the same issues. So, I’m going with it, in gratitude for those who post such things, so that I might find them in a moment of ‘need’ for myself.

“The search for reason ends at the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. It alone knows the route to that which is remote from experience and understanding. Neither of them is amphibious: reason cannot go beyond the shore, and the sense of the ineffable is out of place where we measure, where we weigh. We do not leave the shore of the known in search of adventure or suspense or because of the failure of reason to answer our questions. We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore. Citizens of two realms, we all must sustain a dual allegiance: we sense the ineffable in one realm, we name and exploit reality in another. Between the two we set up a system of references, but we can never fill the gap. They are as far and as close to each other as time and calendar, as violin and melody, as life and what lies beyond the last breath.”
– Abraham Joshua Heschel
Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion

Am I Going?

Somewhere, in the middlin-end of the night, a light shadow flicked across the surface of my brain and I knew it was light moving through legs and calves and feet. Feet wearing oxford shoes, manly-type oxford shoes. Flexed a toe, to feel for new, inflexible and squeaky hard bottomed platforms. Flexed a toe to feel for the groove, a careful bend and give, familiarity, soft scuffles and the touch of the earth terrain–lumps and bumps and LIFE!

I heard rain. Gentle drips and splatters sneaking through the canopy of trees, making the slow motion crash from surface to surface slowing down until at last perching upon the perfect tip with minute point awaiting(of course)the touch of my finger that mine eyes might glorify such perfection in drop, for an hour or two minutes, whichever comes first to mind.

To lick manly fur or drop? My mouth IS dry! I neeeeeed a drink! Such treasure hunts for dew, endling-walks at night. Manly fur it is, good choice, thirst quenched. Now.

I contemplate opening one eye. I practice. Definately NOT the left one first today. Where am I going? I am going to open the right eye, just to see. And then, close it again. And be distracted by the manly scent of fur. And pine a moment for the going, and the coming back again. This moment is sublime. What does sublime mean?

Ah! Too late, I am already going down the stairs and making tea as my feet hit the floor and I sigh and I stretch. And I make the tea, and I check the mail, and I see Janet, asking me if I am going…someplace, somewhere. Janet? I am always full of ING things. I do not at this moment know how to provide a more accurate accounting. I will try to shorten it to, I am always going. How can one NOT be always going?

Phoenix in the Fire

True Lies
Be careful following
Where others have gone before.

In the forest once
I took a track;
It looked well beaten
As if often used.
But it became difficult,
Branches crossed it low
And I slowly realised
It was made by creatures
In whose veins
No human blood flowed.
But I held to it
Becoming more fearful
With each step I took,
Unable to return.
The path held me
Until edging a precipice
It ended in thorns.
I stood there on the edge
Gazing at a fallen tree below,
Long-dead, moss covered,
Splayed out like a corpse fallen
And thought a wrong step now
And I will join it.
Only by an effort of will
Could I climb the slope
To safety and a true path.

Beware truths apparent,
They may be lies in disguise…

© Angela Grant (Kestrel) 28/12/2003

Finding the Key
It is bright day but here I sit
with darkness in my soul.
I seek freedom but always tie myself
to some place, some person,
some self-imprisonment.
Does this make sense? I think not.
What sense can nonsense make?
What hope can hopelessness provide?
I am split as a chestnut husk
splits falling from the tree
revealing nothing but strange confusion.
Enlightenment I seek
yet feel I comfort from the dark.
For what is hidden can reveal
a wealth of mystery beyond itself.
Layer beyond onion layer, lost in the seeking
of a centre impossibly deep.
What meaning can mystery reveal?
What cipher can disclose plain truth
without a key?
Shall the white mare pass
without me following?
She will stop if I ask her.
She has done so before.
Or shall I hawklike
simply hover and watch
and let another chance slip by
gone in an instant.
No, not this time.
When she passes I will call
and let her carry me
where she will.
Now is the time to take a chance,
grasp life to the full
and run with the wind
wherever it may blow.
At summer’s end let only harvest fall,
let me run on and seek that centre
that I have not yet found
or lose myself in never-ending spirals
knowing that a time will come
outside time itself
where all mysteries will be resolved,
all conjunctions joined,
all solutions found
and the end only disclose
another new beginning…

© Angela Grant (Kestrel) 26/8/2004