yesterday, someone's life changed, and not for the better. i'll skip the details but will say that it was a long time coming and telegraphed for years. it shouldn't have been a surprise but i'm sure it was. i will also say that if i were to have a least-favourite-people-in-the-world list, this person would be on it.
and yet... it's hard to celebrate karma in earnest, especially when karma is a bitch. will my life be better because of what happened? probably. but there is suffering at play, and suffering sucks, even when it's directed at your enemy.
it does make me think, though, of all the ways in which life changes on a dime. the ways we can be sailing blissfully along, unaware of the storms that could capsize us at any moment, unaware of the all the ways we are not in control of our own lives. the irony in this particular case is that the person in question is motivated almost solely by a near-rabid desire for control. karma really is a bitch.
and if that's the way she rolls, i'm sure to find myself shredding fingers, bone, and heart in pursuit of an aloof and contained lover. perhaps one day i'll wake to find myself stripped of all armour, emaciated for love, savouring crumbs of affection as if they were feasts. i can only hope.
david gray - falling free
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Monday, May 25, 2015
On being seen
an addition to the refrain of excuse me, i'll be right back. i'm like a bad date in a bad date movie - taking off for the washroom and stiffing the guy for the bill. but i am back, however fleetingly, to raise a flag, or send up a flare, or carve my initials into a tree. i am here.
and yes, i am changed. different from the last me that was here the last time i put anything out into space. i have become quieter. more accustomed to the troughs of my mood, more able to ride out the waves of ecstasy (well, that might be pushing it) and despair. i don't want to sound as if i'm without hope for wisdom. i do hope, fervently, for the coming on of some of my own. it's just that there's so much repetition - here and elsewhere - that i doubt my own epiphanies, have become bored by the frequency of my resolves (to be different, to be better, to be other).
but what i want to say, today: to be seen is the hardest thing. but to see perhaps is just as difficult. to shake the dust out of the eye and take stock of the thing in all its ugliness and brokenness. to see beauty in the rusted hulk of that once-floated barge, to find kindness beneath the scoff of self-protection. and to see too beneath beauty to the scars within - the invisible bruises of violent fathers and absent mothers, the fractures left by all the ways the self has failed its own deepest hopes. and somehow to accept it all, to not wish it to be otherwise, to not wish the beloved more like the self, or less like the other. is this the challenge of relationship? or more, the challenge of becoming?
you said that you hope to be different ten years hence. that there will be more you will know, more understood, more lived. and there will be, yes. what will it look like to be seen, then? who will i be? who will you be? more of ourselves, no doubt. and hopefully seen, and loved, whatever that may look like.
Tracy Chapman - All That You Have Is Your Soul
and yes, i am changed. different from the last me that was here the last time i put anything out into space. i have become quieter. more accustomed to the troughs of my mood, more able to ride out the waves of ecstasy (well, that might be pushing it) and despair. i don't want to sound as if i'm without hope for wisdom. i do hope, fervently, for the coming on of some of my own. it's just that there's so much repetition - here and elsewhere - that i doubt my own epiphanies, have become bored by the frequency of my resolves (to be different, to be better, to be other).
but what i want to say, today: to be seen is the hardest thing. but to see perhaps is just as difficult. to shake the dust out of the eye and take stock of the thing in all its ugliness and brokenness. to see beauty in the rusted hulk of that once-floated barge, to find kindness beneath the scoff of self-protection. and to see too beneath beauty to the scars within - the invisible bruises of violent fathers and absent mothers, the fractures left by all the ways the self has failed its own deepest hopes. and somehow to accept it all, to not wish it to be otherwise, to not wish the beloved more like the self, or less like the other. is this the challenge of relationship? or more, the challenge of becoming?
you said that you hope to be different ten years hence. that there will be more you will know, more understood, more lived. and there will be, yes. what will it look like to be seen, then? who will i be? who will you be? more of ourselves, no doubt. and hopefully seen, and loved, whatever that may look like.
Tracy Chapman - All That You Have Is Your Soul
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