Wash & roll
Rock & tumble
Freely formed
Freshly torn
Lacking any of the stability I’ve ever known or desired
But as
I look around
I feel around
I’m tossed around
I realize what’s really gone — my ideas & my ideals
I find that this spontenaity that swirls around me is
the you I’ve never known before
the you I’ve never lived with before
the you in my life that has never been there before
It’s there now
APN
Copyright 08/15/2005
Fields of stone
Hear the lightning roar
Thoughts disturbed
My peace is gone
Ocean swells
Salted crashes abound
Tempest-tossed
My hope is dashed
Hunger pangs
Acidic growls inside
Deeply starved
My bread is stolen
Hardened words
Misunderstood intent
Gazes iced
My love is absent
APN
Copyright 08/21/2005
I wonder which is better. I wonder if I should even compare them. They possess many of the same attributes, but one implies a certain completion and the other has this perpetual incompletion, a perpetual progression. What I shall attempt to process through here is a comparison of two types of movement, two types of development, two types of growth in an attempt to determine which would be a preferable metaphor
Circles, in a metaphorical sense, transmit a sense of completion, of wholeness, of togetherness. A perfect circle (is there any other kind?) is one in which all of the pieces feel connected, all of the parts are intact, and peace can be achieved out of the disparity that often reigns in lives that are chock-full of disparate pieces. That’s actually a really good means by which to envision a circle — Peace out of the Pieces. One can find rest within a circle. You can drawn inward upon yourself or with a small group to form a protective bond amongst similar souls in order to resist what’s going on outside that might & are disruptive forces.
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I have taken up reading Orthodoxy from G.K. Chesterton as of late, and I thought that I’d share a bit with you as I read through each chapter. With some sections, I’ll probably do some commentary of my own and some days, I’ll let G.K. speak for himself. I’m sure he’d appreciate it.
From Chapter 1, pgs 32-34 — “The Maniac”
“As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed forever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and contradiction, can extend its four arms forever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox at its cetre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers.
Symbols alone are of even a cloudy value in speaking of this deep matter; and another symbol from physical nature will express sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind. The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the patron of poetry and the patron of healing. Of necessary dogmas and a special creed I shall speak later. But that transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name.”
Du dunkelnder Grund, geduldig ertragst du die Mauern
Dear darkening ground,
you’ve endured so patiently the walls we’ve built,
perhaps you’ll give the cities one more hour
and grant the churches and cloisters two.
And those that labor — maybe you’ll let their work
grip them another five hours, or seven,
before you become forest again, and water, and
widening wilderness
in that hour of inconceivable terror
when you take back your name
from all things.
Just give me a little more time!
I want to love the things
as no one has thought to love them,
until they’re real and ripe and worthy of you.
I want only seven days, seven
on which no one has ever written himself –
seven pages of solitude.
There will be a book that includes these pages,
and she who takes it in her hands
will sit staring at it a long time.
until she feels that she is being held
and you are writing.
Ranier Maria Rilke,
The Book of a Monastic Life, 61
Fractured Realizations
My definitions aren’t worth all that much.
Anyway.
My understandings are full of fallacies.
Run away,
Far, far away
My presentation is a failure, a sham.
Anyway.
My preparations incomplete, broken up.
Run away,
Far, far away.
And it’s not that I’ve got it all wrong,
But I certainly don’t have it all right.
And though I try to realize
I need to keep off my disguise,
I seem to forget,
I try to forget,
I cannot forget all my lies.
APN,
Copyright 08/13/2005
Tripartite
A way to know
A means to knowing
How one can be
How we can become
A way to grow
A means for growing
How one starts to live
How we keep on with our living
A way to move
A means for moving
How one can go beyond
How we can go beyond just going
APN,
Copyright, 08/12/2005
