Indwelling

Indwelling
By T.E. Brown


IF thou couldst empty all thyself of self,
Like to a shell dishabited,
Then might He find thee on the Ocean shelf,
And say—" This is not dead,"—
And fill thee with Himself instead.

But thou art all replete with very thou,
And hast such shrewd activity,
That, when He comes, He says :—" This is enow
Unto itself—’Twere better let it be:
It is so small and full, there is no room for Me."



In a much previous post,
I hoped I would not be left empty for the way I internalized this poem.

I think I would like to add to that,
a hope that I would never be full.. either extreme can be prohibitive of interactions of an individual with the surrounding environment. Were I full, I would no longer be able to receive new input from my surroundings. If I cannot interact with my surroundings in any way, I might as well be dead.

Stars

I was worried once, years ago, that I'd accidentally misplaced associations and lost something important, but no,

the voice that comes from the sky reassured me,

You will always find your love in the stars,

(and, the voice is right).

Love is

Someone once told him, and he passed it along to me:

"Love is a constant attempt at understanding."


It reminded me of what I thought I'd learned from the lyrics of Fleetwood Mac's Landslide


A willingness to seek and understand, especially amid constant change, I think, implies a willingness to be transformed, since new understandings change and develop a person in different ways.

So, with help from The Alchemist I add:
"Love is a willingness to be transformed."

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

This man had brilliantly-expressed attitudes towards living and dying.

His full lecture at Carnegie Mellon lasts 1hr 16min, but it is well worth the watch.

I am glad for the opportunity to learn from his inobstructable life.

Message from Future Self

"Don't worry, there's no rush. Take good care of yourself and keep your head up. Have faith - it will be ok."

Fishbowl

At one time, I'd asked for a sign
to help me identify a person

A friend asked me once, what I would do if I got it.
'I think I'd cry'

A year later, my ideas of fate and signs had changed, but I knew when I found its equivalent, and

I was right.

I cry at things I don't understand
and things that are true
and I'd just found something all of good, longed-for, unexpected, and real.

However, the near future contained sudden modifications to the situation I thought I'd found, and the side-effects from it which I'd accepted on temporary conditions swelled like ice until entire paths turned to rubble. The maw between what could and what was yawned until one gray morning I woke for the last time for the next year beneath my bed, unusually confused by my surroundings and feeling like a seasick sailor. My first task was to understand that I'd never before understood what being homesick really felt like.

For a year, I lived with experiences and colors at once too subdued and too brilliant to be continuously real. I looked out windows as if they were closed eyelids. When I awoke suddenly this January, my memory of the time preceding seemed to fade more quickly. My inclination is to explain this in terms of a lived dream, but this is probably not useful as I'll only confuse myself with attempted justifications for uncorrelations resulting from a poor organizing metaphor. It is poetic though.

The hope I'd let dissolve revived in the real world, and I searched for a phrase to describe how I felt. I wanted to say it felt surreal or felt like I was dreaming except that those sentiments are both cliché and false. If anything, I felt like I'd finally woken up.

But further complications continuously submerge me into an underwater realm of subconscious. At times I find myself free of this fishbowl, but eventually my sense of the vitality of reality fades. I don't know if I'm exaggerating or getting complacent.

I sometimes find a distinction between waking and sleeping useful because knowing that the reality I exist in will not stay helps me get through dreams. I had a sign above my pillow saying 'Reality' with an arrow pointing towards the rest of my room. But,
I probably do not help my situation by dividing time between dreaming and awake. It might all be one tangled string of possible correlations and attempted explanations.

.

I heard that there was a study done on rats in which the rats received random shocks regardless of what levers they pressed or what actions they did or didn't perform. I heard the rats ceased to function.



The ability to function is an extremely important one to me. Perhaps this is why I feel like I have so much trouble with it. Perhaps I want the wrong kinds of explanations - the kinds that use words and begin with 'because'.


I think I will never get out of the fishbowl by specifically trying.



(further thoughts might unroll, I feel them curled like ferns around these images)

Go

(A friend of mine is an avid Go player. He went once to a weekend Go conference, and played against the instructor. My heavily paraphrased illustration of what he told me:)




He placed his stone on the board.

"Why did you go there?" she asked

"It felt like a good move." he replied
he was telling me this story as a response to my decent beginning intuition

"But why," she pressed. "You should have a reason."




I suppose intuition and reason are at their best when tempered with each other.

I kid you not

I decided to go biking in the Tideman-Johnson direction today (3.12.07),
for personal reasons.

I didn't go very far,
I just needed to go. There is a river
that moves near the trail.

When I came to the road, I turned to go back
and saw a small trail that might be difficult to bike on without sliding.
I decided to take it,
for crazy reasons.

I biked, and slid some, and came to a place where the river was framed with beautifully arranged stones - where I drew that picture.

****
I interrupt this story to bring you a previous narrative of how, when snowboarding at Mt. Hood, there was a trail through the forest that looked as though I must go very slowly and take care not to fall too close to trees. I decided to take it,
for crazy reasons.

I fell many times, very near trees.
One of these times, I stayed down - tired and uncertain of where it was safe to move. Then I looked up, and the sun was shining through the pine trees that towered over me, holding the sky on their pointed tops.

****
I interrupt this narrative to bring you the instant in which, no longer able to sit still, I needed to go do something involving expending large amounts of physical energy and velocity,
for personal crazy reasons.

I took my bike, and went south in the rain. It seemed as though the clouds were breaking up so I chose the route that would take me to the overpass, in case the sun came out. The rain kept coming in thin little streaks as the sky became lighter. And, as I turned into a curve, moving very quickly, the sidewalk framed on both sides by sleek pines, the sun brushed its mask of clouds aside and the world became a brilliant glare of silver and outlines.

The wet road lit up white with reflection, the white clouds filling the sky showered down gleaming glassy threads of rain, the pines standing tall on either side of me became as shining ice. As I turned the corner, before the sun again retreated, my world was one of glossy white and edges.
******

The pines held clumps of snow in their branches which the sun, melting it, caused to fall like rain around me and
I swear the sun had such an angle that every single drop hanging, falling from the branches shone like a diamond in a commercial.

What could I do but lean back into the snow and watch the drops fall from the tops of the pines in the brilliant sky
stopping short of my eyes, descending instead on my goggles?

It took me a long time to get back to the main path and the lift,
but the such a surprise was so worth it.
****

I watched the water run through the shape of the river
and the sun came in and out of hiding (as did the hummingbirds). It occurred to me to blur my eyes a bit and watch the river's patterns. The shape of the river does not change as the water hurtles through it like a bird through a banquet hall,
and down the small waterfall between nicely-walled and arched stones on either side.

I walked down a bit past the froth from the waterfall and,
I kid you not
the sun was sinking left and behind me, and as I looked back upriver,
it was as if the froth was laced with silver glitter.
****

With this in mind
I have decided
that the best path to take
is the crazy one
the one that you might slip or fall in, but invites a try.

But only if you keep your head up
and keep the sun in mind
otherwise, for all you'll learn, you might as well have taken the easy way home.

And today,
I wanted to climb a tree and sit in the top like a lotus

because of things like cherry blossoms
and rivers, and how the shapes of pain and joy and love and loss and life and death flow together

because today dying and falling in love seem like the same thing,
both mess with the sense of identity
There is too much river out there
and too little me to refuse either.

Because I've answered the question I've asked myself for years:

Given one of two options,
which would you choose?
1) To expend your life in search of truth with the foreknowledge that you would never find it,
2) To live comfortably and happy, never finding truth, but never searching either.

I am suspicious of people who choose option #1 too quickly. I wonder if they understand either of the choices.
It's been 2 years since the question was posed to me in this way.

Today my final answer is a solid #1.