No use teasing the darkness...

[Christmas Letter, 1966] Most of you, even with all that you have to suffer, are much better off than you realize. Yet the heart of man can be full of so much pain, even when things are exteriorly "all right". It becomes all the more difficult because today we are used to thinking that there are explanations for everything. But there is no explanation for most of what goes on in our own hearts, and we cannot account for it all. No use resorting to mental tranquilizers that even religious explanations sometimes offer. Faith must be deeper than that, rooted in the unknown and in the abyss of darkness that is the ground of our being. No use teasing the darkness to try to make answers grow out of it. But if we learn how to have a deep inner patience, things solve themselves, or God solves them if you prefer, but do not expect to see how. Just learn to wait, and do what you can and help other people.

Thomas Merton. The Road to Joy, Robert E. Daggy, editor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989): 94.


Often in helping someone else we find the best way to bear with our own trouble.

The Road to Joy: 94.

I <3 Your Heart

What if…

"We need much bigger pockets...We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families, and our friends, and even the people who aren’t on our lists, people we’ve never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe." p.74

"What if the water that came out of the shower was treated with a chemical that responded to a combination of things, like your heartbeat, and your body temperature, and your brain waves, so that your skin changed color according to your mood? If you were extremely excited your skin would turn green, and if you were angry you’d turn red, obviously, and if you felt like shiitake you’d turn brown, and if you were blue you’d turn blue.

Everyone could know what everyone else felt, and we could be more careful with each other, because you’d never want to tell a person whose skin was purple that you’re angry at her for being late, just like you would want to pat a pink person on the back and tell him, “Congratulations!”

Another reason it would be a good invention is that there are so many times when you’re feeling a lot of something, but you don’t know what the something is. Am I frustrated? Am I actually just panicky? And the confusion changes your mood, it becomes your mood, and you become a confused, gray person. But with the special water, you could look at your orange hands and think, I’m happy! That whole time I was actually happy! What a relief!" p.163

“…wouldn’t it be great if mattresses had spaces for your arm, so that when you rolled onto your side you could fit just right?’ ‘That would be nice.’ ‘And good for your back, probably, because it would let your spine be straight, which I know is important.’ ‘That is important.’ ‘Also, it would make snuggling easier. You know how that arm constantly gets in the way?’ ‘I do.’ ‘And making snuggling easier is important.’ ‘Very.’"p.170

And other reasons to heart your heart:

"None of my pets know their own names, what kind of person am I?" p.33

"Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are." p.99

"It was late, and we were tired.

We assumed there would be other nights…

I said, I want to tell you something.

She said, You can tell me tomorrow.

I had never told her how much I loved her.

She was my sister.

We slept in the same bed.

There was never a right time to say it.

It was always unnecessary…

I thought about waking her.

But it was unnecessary.

There would be other nights.

And how can you say I love you to someone you love?

I rolled on my side and fell asleep next to her.

Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you…

It’s always necessary.

I love you,

Grandma"

p.314

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer

did i post this already?

The Invitation - Oriah Mountain Dreamer

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, 'Yes.'

It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

The Awe-someness of Pie

Errr, No ... Pi :


"Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love - but sometimes it was so hard to love. Sometimes my heart was sinking so fast with anger, desolation and weariness, I was afraid it would sink to the bottom of the Pacific and I would not be able to lift it back up...

Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out. It was a hell beyond expression. I thank God it always passed. A school of fish appeared around the net or a knot cried out to be reknotted. Or I thought of my family, of how they were spared this terrible agony. The blackness would stir and eventually go away, and God would remain, a shining point of light in my heart. I would go on loving" (p. 208-209)

--------------

"I awoke once during the night. I pushed the canopy aside and looked out. The moon was a sharply defined crescent and the sky was perfectly clear. The stars shone with such fierce, contained brilliance that it seemed absurd to call the night dark. The sea lay quietly bathed in a shy, light-footed light, a dancing play of black and silver that extended without limits all about me. The volume of things was confounding - the volume of air above me, the volume of water around and beneath me. I was half-moved, half- terrified...

For the first time I noticed - as I would notice repeatedly during my ordeal, between one throe of agony and the next - that my suffering was taking place in a grand setting. I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant, and I was still. My suffering did not fit anywhere, I realized. And I could accept this. It was all right " (p. 177).

Yann Martel - Life of Pi

For no one in particular - you know who you are

"Next to the speakerphone is a fat daily planner book they keep full of things for me to get done. They want me to account for my next ten years, task by task. Their way, everything in your life turns into an item on a list. Something to accomplish. You get to see how your life looks flattened out.
The shortest distance between two points is a time line, a schedule, a map of your time, the itinerary for the rest of your life.
Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list...
Seeing it down in black and white, somehow you're always disappointed in your life expectancy. How little you'll really get done. The resume of your future."

Chuck Palahniuk - Survivor (p. 269).

---------

"Nothing would change. Every day. This was success. Here was the prize.
Mowing the lawn.
And mowing the lawn.
And mowing the lawn.
Repeat"
(p. 191)

Step Outside the Box

"And once more I see him the way he appeared to me at the very beginning of the novel: standing at the window and staring across the courtyard to the walls opposite.
This is the image from which he was born. As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman: they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.
But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?
Staring impotently across a courtyard, at a loss for what to do; hearing the pertinacious rumbling of one's own stomach during a moment of love; betraying, yet lacking the will to abandon the glamorous path of betrayal; raising one's first with the crowds in a Grand March; displaying one's wit before hidden microphones - I have known all these situations, I have experienced them myself, yet none of them has given rise to the person my curriculum vitae and I represent. The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become. But enough. Let us return to [him]" (p 221)

Lightness and Weight

"The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful. From the time he met [her], no woman had a right to leave the slightest impression on that part of his brain. [She] occupied his poetic memory like a despot and exterminated all trace of other women...

I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory." (208-209)

- The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera -

Notes on Illusions

"The days blurred one into another...I began counting the [time] by the things I learned, the talks we had...and by the miracles that happened now and then along the way..." (p.114)

"The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family group up under the same roof." (p.84)

"You teach best what you most need to learn." (p.60)

"You are always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past" (p.63)

"You seek problems because you need their gifts." (p.71)

Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah - Richard Bach

For lil sis

"...There's no joy like the joy of the sun coming in..."
-Peter Gabriel and Angelique Kidjo - the song Salala-

on the importance of hygiene

i forgot to write about this months ago (so some obvious revision because my memory is useless)
visiting one of my magnificent old roomies - the new(ish) mom...

roomie A: (looking at baby) she's going to make a mess of herself and then I'll have to give her another bath.

me: (quizzical look) how often do you have to wash a baby?

roomie A: (obviously not phased by my lack of knowledge) well... about every few days. They don't really get very dirty naturally, unless they make a mess playing.

me: Ha. I have like the same hygiene regiment. there's really no reason to shower EVERY day.

roomie A: yeah. me too. I'm lucky if I have time to shower, anyway.

husband of roomie A: you two are disgusting. no wonder you were roommates. i bet no one else would live with you because you're so dirty.

beginnings, endings & aspirations

from john o'donohue's conamara blues:


BEFORE THE BEGINNING

Unknown to us, there are moments
When crevices we cannot see open
For time to come alive with beginning.

As in autumn a field of corn knows
When enough green has been inhaled
From the clay and under the skill
Of an artist breeze becomes gold in a day,

When the ocean still as a mirror
Of a sudden takes a sinister curve
To rise in a mountain of wave
That would swallow a village.

How to a flock of starlings
Scattered, at work on grass,
From somewhere, a signal comes
And suddenly as one, they describe
A geometric shape in the air.

When the audience becomes still
And the soprano lets the silence deepen,
In that slowed holding, the whole aria
Hovers nearer than alights
On the wings of breath
Poised to soar into song.

These inklings were first prescribed
The morning we met in Westport
And I was left with such sweet time
Wondering if between us something
Was deciding to begin or not.

-------------------------------------------
DOUBLE EXPOSURE

Sometimes you see us
Run into each other in a place
Where we cannot simply pass,
Say at a party, and you overhear
Our breath quiveringly collect
To shape a voice sure enough
To play out some pleasantry;
Something humorous is preferable,
It covers perfectly and shows
That everything is as it should be.
As smoothly as possible
We allow ourselves to be waylaid
By some other conversation and escape.
Though we move around the room,
We always know where we stand,
Still strangely bound to each other
In this intermittent dance
Between the music, each careful
To hold up the other side of all
We were to each other before
It stopped, and let nothing slip
From the invisible ruin
We carry between us.


-----------------------------------------
FLUENT

I would love to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.

who do you think you are?

The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real.
-Merton - seven storey mountain

What if the question is not, why am i so infrequently the person i really want to be, but why do i so infrequently want to be the person i really am?
-oriah mountain dreamer - the dance

another case of the mondays

watching tv.

a speed dating commercial comes on....

mom: have you ever tried speed dating?

me: no. have you?

dad: I have.

mom: oh?

dad: yes. you just push one number on the phone. just one.

mom: that's speed dialing.

dad: yeah, i speed date all the time.

--------------------------------------------------------

watching "raising helen" on the oxygen network.

dad: is that madonna?

me: no, that's kate hudson. she's goldie hawn's daughter.

(sad moment.. kate hudson's character gets bad news)

dad: (sincerely) awwww. I'm sorry madonna.

(music plays)

dad: is that "like a prayer" ?

mom: no. how do you know the name of a madonna song though?

in the dog house

this morning -

me: mom? dad? where is everyone?

mom: in here watching the news. come say hi.

me: wait a minute, how come the dog gets to sleep in your bed and i have to sleep on the floor?

-------------------------------------------------
this afternoon -

me: what have you been doing all morning?

mom: researching jobs for your father to apply to.

me: wait a minute, how come you don't research and apply for jobs for me?

mom: (quizzical look) do you WANT a job?

me: ah, point taken.

some things make your soul feel clean

An Email chain From Friends:

L wrote:
At lunch today:

H: "Hold hands!"
I: [from across the table] "I can't reach, H!"
L: "I'll connect you guys."

[All holding hands]

H: [looking at plate] "Thank you Kefir. Thank you broccoli. Thank you mashed potatoes. Thank you mushrooms. Thank you..."
[I does the same to her food].

The "thank-you chicken"'s were my favourite.

What are you grateful for today?

-------------------------------------------------------
S wrote:
today I am grateful for coffeeshops in Tel Aviv
the nicest waitresses on the planet
for busses that take me where I want to go
for my dad's wine fridge (yes, wine fridge)
for shrinking bank accounts that whittle down my options
for computers that burn CDs
for candles that burn
for the quiet of night
for the internet on the wings of which L's message came to me..
-------------------------------------------------------
D wrote:
For time, rolling out like an enormous string of yarn, the one remedy that we can count on to eventually soothe out any pain and smooth out the roughness of almost any memory. The only trail that even when utterly cluttered up by cities, building, smog and individuals, will eventually carry us on.

For the harshness and obstinacy of the new lampposts installed between my parents condominium and the sea - smudging out with yellowing mediocrity the sole place in Tel Aviv without any light pollution - gently pencilled out on the very first night with the harsh diagonal lines of sea-storm rain.

For desk lamps and books, pistachio nuts and red wine.

For S's music, which had been helping me a lot in the last couple of days.

For the beautiful space that I now work in, with the red sun rushing in through the salted blue wooden shutters and splashing on the earthenware tiles. For the smell of wood emanating from the double doors.

For opportunities that after a barren summer come scratching at the doors.

For lacunae of friendship and light, like the house on Colenso parade.

For chances like this to pause and reflect and write it down.

For the two of you, across an incomprehensible ocean and a mass of very interesting land.

For friends.

Costa Rica by Doga - 2008

back to my roots

me: gosh, is it only 5:30 pm? I could go to sleep right now.

grandma (smiling mischievously): well, what else is new?

----------------------------------------------------------------

mom and auntie sift through an old scrap book...

dad: (sees an old photo of clark gable) that clark gable, he's a handsome man. i'd like to date him.

uncle: don't be ridiculous. you can't date dead people.

soul mates ?

"Seymore used consciously to affect a whole set of different kinds of duplicity, of which he was proud, and he had carried the mendacium jocosum or "humorous lie" to its utmost extension and frequency. You could sometimes gauge the falsity of his answersby their promptitude: the quicker the falser. The reason for this was probably, that he was thinking of something else, something very abstruse and far from the sphere of your question, and he could not be boethered to bring his mind all that way back, to think up the real answer...
there was generally no inconvenience about this, for two reasons. Since Seymour generally gave his false answers only to practical questions of fact, their falsity did not matter: we were all too impractical. Besides his false answers were generally more interesting than the truth. Finally, since we knew they were false anyway, we had the habit of seeing all his statements, in the common factual order by a kind of double standard, instituting a comparison between what he had said and the probable truth, and this cast many interesting and ironical lights upon life as a whole. ...

moral theologians say that the mendacium jocosum in itself does not exceed a venial sin."

- Merton - Seven Storey Mountain p. 200ish -

they're still awesomely hilarious... i just forget to write it down

ok...did you ever listen to ingrid michaelson?

she's got this song, about marriage i think, that goes like this...

"what if i never let you in... and chase you with a rolling pin"

the song is playing as mom and I drive somewhere...

me: "mom, what if i never let you in... and chased you with a rolling pin"

mom (quietly thoughtful): "well... i guess i'd grab your arm... and try to spin you around to protect myself"

------------------------------------

me: dad, mom is MAKING me feel bad about dirtying the dishes.

dad: let me show you where to put the dishes (brings me out the back door to the deck).
these little slots here (pointing to the holes between the deck boards) are the perfect size to just slip the plates in. the knives and forks fit too.

me: yeah sure, but what about the bowls and cups?

dad: well... you know how archeologists find all those pieces of old dishes? you just have to break them up, or throw them under a tree or something. what we're doing is leaving little bits of history for people in the future, so that they know what things were like.

mom: what are you two doing out here?
-------------------------------------------------------

me: mom, i'm hungry. are we going to have dinner?

mom: (preparing plates) yes it's done. sit at the table.

me (to dad 10 seconds later): this is sure taking a long time since she said it was done. i'm really hungry.

dad: maybe we should order a pizza or something.

me: at least it'd get here faster.

mom: i'm standing next to the block of knives.

nostalgia - or the 3rd time the car radio was stolen... 3rd - not last

email chain with lil sis about a year ago:

lil sis: i miss you.the radio may have been stolen again.

me: the radio "may" have been stolen?

lil sis:and by "may have" I mean, was.

last night roommate cooked for me and I threw up

me: eff that effing radio.

from now on we just hum.

and so we did....

back at it

mom: (to dad) don't you want mustard with that liverwurst?

dad:  yeah.  but i really have no way of getting it. ( long sigh....)

me:  i'll get it for you.

mom:  don't do it.  he'll come to expect it.

dad:  ok.  just so you realize our daughter is just doing me a favor.  REALLY... she's doing YOUR job.

--------------------------

me: can we get a dog?

mom: we have a dog.

me: i know.