Every January the same tumble: colors drain, a fog settles between my senses and the objects they try to discern. And I can't help but contemplate that I was born in January when this collapse occurs. I don't feel like a spirit eager to lap up the stuff of things incarnate. All the love (carnal, of course), the greed, the hate, the passion even seem like such an overwhelming effort. Such a distraction from the sweet inner silence.

There is nothing like a bout of insomnia lasting three consecutive nights or so to strip the psyche of faith. Or perhaps what I call faith is illusion, and it is the illusory projections of future joy, happiness and satisfaction that are purified. All well and good. I need to discover whether I can experience beauty in the midst of this zombie-like drift among very-present shadows. If beauty can be discerned, then perhaps the other stuff is an illusion and good riddance.

Poetry: passing through words into silence, into the nameless. Mathematics: passing through forms into the formless.

~ Simone W

It's been one of those weeks... of longing. For the fragrance of creosote after a hot monsoon shower. For the spartan pines, solitary and enduring atop a mesa. For the silence of a desert night nested under a thousand stars.

Keeping up with civilization seems like the least of worthy tasks. Particularly as it (the civilization) is in the midst of a mad dash of consumerist self-destruction. Truth is forgotten. I think it has gone off to the silent, waiting place.

Prophecy: a blue star appears above the lake

Now the vines are growing around the pearls. The vine leaves are gold and they glow from the impact of the sun streaming through white clouds. I pick a leaf and eat it. It is hot, it burns as I chew it, it burns as it travels down my throat and into my body. When it reaches my eyes, the path before me begins to glow with a golden hue. The vine forest drops away and a vast lake of gold appears.

(Should I have eaten a pearl? The opportunity is now gone. Did I just piss away my most important task?)

***


Language sinks its roots into this world but transforms its juices and reactions into signs and symbols. Language is the consequence (or the cause) of our exile from the universe, signifying the distance between things and ourselves. If our exile were to come to an end, language would come to an end.

~ Octavio Paz

When in the morning air the golden harp is tuned

but found no repose in me. I gave myself up for lost in the depth of a glad despair - in the shadow

She sees leaves dancing in the wind, sudden swirling gusts gathering in whirlpools. She becomes afraid.

"It's a ghost," she says, and refuses to step outside, into the waiting grasp of the phantom.

Her mother takes a glance through the door, sighs with impatience.

"There's no ghost there. It's just the wind," she says. To herself: "Where does the child get these ideas!"

"No ghost?" The girl echoes. She is confused between the evidence of her intellect and her mother's authority. She steps gingerly out, unsure as yet which to believe.

The bees are dying. The world without bees is a world without beauty. Without color. No fruits. No vegetables. No flowers. No flowers!

Do I want to live in a world delivered to weeds?

We are robbing ourselves of this beauty. The bees are the latest link in a chain of human sin - the sin of the refusal of beauty. Refusal of beauty: exactly as if we were tossing God's gift to us into the garbage bin, because we don't deem it useful. Useful as we define it, of course, which is usually some gratification of our self-centered pleasure.

One of Weil's definitions of sin:

consolation: an escape from the real by means of illusory substitutions which deny the harshness and aloneness of creation

Like the time I said yes to M, making of him a substitute divine spouse, an all-wise husband-prophet who would never abandon me. And who would rescue me from my guilt. Most especially from that.

Meanwhile, my buried envy of the eight-year-old crying silently because Jesus was perfect but she would never be able to rescue him from his father's plan - my envy said:

Forget that childish world. Get on with it. Grow up. Have some children of your own. Then you'll see that Jesus should have yielded to the temptation.

Our encounters with phenomena, of which ideas (psychological or otherwise) are metaxus, or intermediaries, to the divine (Bion's "O"). Experience is the bridge to O, the Mystery of Being. Properly understood, it is the way O unfolds through us. The Work ought to remind people, first and foremost, that they exist, that they have an experience, and that this experience emerges, continually and tirelessly, in search of realization.

This world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.

The essence of created things is to be intermediaries.

~Simone W

And this from a psychology conference!

Human beings are containers for the Mystery expressing itself in all its myriad ways. The more flexible our containers (our capacity to bear catastrophic change), the more can manifest through us.

***

The container is an internalizing, integrating function. It is that which turns the soul towards the Good.

***

The opposite is the dis-integrating tendency to evacuate experience. As such, it is evil (as Fr. Joseph defined it).

***

There is a dimension of ourselves that exceeds mere existence, an inviolate core which refuses to be known. It is only interested in becoming - becoming in the direction of the mystery.

On the Divine Image

Question: How can human beings be in the image of God when they are so wretched and so ugly?

Reply: We are raw stuff, like a piece of wood, and God is carving us all the time. He is constantly perfecting the image that can only be a reflection of Himself, since there is nothing other than God. But we have to fully consent to be so shaped.

Oct 12, 4:47 PM (Ordinary Time)

The monks were discussing The Matrix over dinner in hushed but excited voices. Yes, the movie. And it was the elder monk who was filling in the younger ones. The others kept asking for a clarification of the basic premise, i.e., who is actually “real” while in the Matrix. This vexed several of them and they wanted examples. The elder monk delivered an earnest explanation about body plugs and lifetimes spent in sleep.

Only if you were born into the Matrix and then liberated from it could you go between the two worlds.

Insomnia: robber of clarity, attention, precision. Hence a robber of the apprehension of beauty, since the good, the true, and the beautiful can only be discerned through a disciplined and sustained concentration. This being the case, I am puzzling about why the world’s contemplative traditions prescribe so much sleeplessness. There are orders of the Benedictines whose first services begin at 3:30 AM. The monks at Abhayagiri stay up all night long once a month. When I try it, the world is simply a weary blur. I don’t much care for the beauty and the divine order because the order of the mechanism of my body and my senses is in disarray.

Today started with despair that the uprootedness had gone so deep that I might never be touched by beauty again.

Look: the sun has spread its wings
over the earth to dispel the darkness.

Like a great tree, with its roots in heaven,
and its branches reaching down to the earth.

~Judah Al-Harizi

I told her I was afraid of visions of banquets, lusty fatty steak fantasies, mounds of bread smothered with creamy butter assaulting my imagination and hijacking my attention away from the beauty of the world.

She said she fasted for ten days once. On the third day she could not stop seeing herself chasing a rabbit, pouncing on it, ripping it open with her bare hands. The delights of raw rabbit flesh pursued her relentlessly for days, then waned as the body submitted to the fact of its provisional existence, here on Earth.

Just as I had fallen – oh again! – into forgetting, the languid light of October streaked against the row of windows, hard and penetrating. And the soul said yes, this is why you’re here. This moment, this instant of bursting radiance.

Uprootedness, part 3

Uprootedness, part 2

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul

~Simone Weil
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Fear loves noise because it stops the fear from being heard

~Carl Jung