Category: love

Altar

At the crossroads.

On the day of the dead, among this cloud of witnesses, someone here whispers, help me find it again, that joy I once had in looking. Instead of an answer, this space, and the hum of a motor nearby. 

We love the old trees of our myths for the spaces they hold inside themselves, but also for the way they know to keep it around them, this cushion of shade made soft by the absence of another tree.

In the eruption of any given birth, a core could easily splinter, and yet here we are, faces dappled by the light and noise of becoming, learning to make room for what would breathe.

Interested Party

Notes on the hero artist.

We who knew him called him friend, and we did this with relief, in celebration. Look, we were saying, there are still some who make their own rules. It is still possible to live a dream.

No, he would say, it is not possible. Only necessary. As he saw it, this was the point.

Why would he spend so long, some wondered, in certain conversations? We could not pull him away, and all he had to say for himself was, it was all so interesting.

***

Adapted from comments made by Betsy Sussler in celebration of the life of Michael Goldberg, appearing in BOMB’s Summer 2008 feature, In Memoriam: Michael Goldberg.

Reunion

By the weeping wall.

Near the wall of weeping stones there are reminders. So much happens beyond the light. One day, someone decides that the wall deserves more of our attention, and we gather nearby. In the process, we leave parts of our lives in wrong places. 

–––A full basket of laundry, for example, in the middle of the hallway in the courthouse; a bucket of dishes in the fountain of the business park. Someone thinks, why not? and we get to washing them and now all we need is food. Someone calls their cousins to bring the grill. It is suggested that here is not the place for that, and the suggestion is collectively ignored. Unbuttoning his shirt, a guard offers tables. They’re inside, he tells us. Groups bring them out. 

We cover them with cloth, candles, decorative plates, bottles of liquid, prayer cards, poems. Now that we have altars, the musicians begin. Once we have music, others arrive. Now we are a large circle by the weeping wall.  A naked child runs laughing to the nearby ducks, outstretched hands and fingers splayed. An official story has ruptured before its conclusion and it falls in the center of our circle, bleeding song.

Bird in Space

With Constantin Brancusi.

Those who tried to know you called you an escape artist, but your sculptures embodied pure presence. What presence, though? Something just beyond.

Here is prayer. Here is torment. Here is the gate of the kiss. Here the sleeping child, beginning of the world. Here the torso of a young man, boundary maker. Here is the eye. Enter.

You worked the substance of your bronze, polishing an intention. Let there be light. All my life, you said, I have sought only the essence of flight. You positioned your bird to catch the sun. 

Some thought it was a tongue of flame, the point where fire becomes spirit. You said only that your task was to unite all forms.

When asked what moves you, you said, love. In this, you saw a light stronger than sun. Being loved matters little, you said. The purpose of a life is to give and give it continually, with all the strength of being.

Until? Until you are beyond this state of being. Until you are something else.

Like a bird? Someone asked. And another, like light? You replied only, like any One that contains all forms.

***

Inspired by the life and work of Constantin Brancusi. I spent time this morning with this article by Sidney Geist in Notes in the History of Art: Brancusi’s Bird in Space: A Psychological Reading (Spring 1984). 

What Lives

A still, small voice.

My grandmother used to say something about the darkness of hope. How it bears fruit in the light of wisdom. By watching her when she was living and listening after her death, I knew Grace. This was her name.

Revolt against death, she would say, by remembering the dead; the next breath a reminder that it was their breath before a final exhalation. Knowing this, breathe full and long. To forget is to die a little.

There were pages and pages behind these reminders. I read them as survival manuals for creatures of flesh. They said, be poor. Go down. Be despised, love anyway. Serve instead of demanding service. 

There were maps too, but no territories. They said only: Look––in hunger and thirst, through long nights and vast deserts. There you will find company with the soul of all souls. You will hear the heartbeat and what follows will be the first song of the world. 

You will know it, child. Go down.

Possibilities for Becoming

With Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

If much of sight is the weight of understanding––the weight of the world, as the saying goes–– why not a vision to pull us forward and up, binding us to one another and this earth? What happens when one person and then many––live in devotion to the process of discovering this renewal: its anatomy and breath, its sublimated wants, and how its needs at their core might include us? In an age of crisis, we face over and again the possibility of a coming end, on a road increasingly populated by our dead and dying. What does it take to remember love––even here, and hold it long enough to see a way to its next beginning? You noticed sacredness in imperfection, even pain––because it is, because we are, because we are becoming. Of this age of loss, you suggested, now we are getting somewhere.

***

Inspired by the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Altitude

And the ones who come down.

In another world, everyone lives in the mountains where time falls more slowly. To boast in this world is to speak of the heights you knew, have known, will soon attain. The elites put their houses on stilts. 

Only the careless leave the peaks for the valleys, to feel the soft grasses and the waters of the streams and lakes. The people of the heights watch them and scoff at the waste, but sound is denser in the lowlands, so the swimmers cannot hear them––not with the all of the birds and the crickets and the lowland creatures in the grasses and not with the water in their ears. It took them by surprise at first, the noises spilling out of these lowlands.

What’s that? They wondered at first. Later, they knew it was time. The creatures released it. The visitors caught what they could and threw it back. They began to make their own and it was music.

***

Inspired by one of the worlds described in Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, (“26 April 1905”).

Incandescence

All that glimmers.

The first rule of mosaic is the play of light. An irregular surface invites its dance. A photographer writes volume after volume in light. It’s an ambiguous form. Are you making or finding?

It’s one of those questions that sounds more absurd out loud than it probably did in a theoretical dream space. Sight is impossible without shadow. Still, there’s a common impulse to drive them out.

As in, are you here or do you remember? Is your home private or in the public space? Same questions apply to your body, your books, your truest confessions, the ones you wrote in light across the faces of strangers that stopped for you. You wrote the same letter over and over again, and each time you picked up your instrument to look, you began with the first light of the world.

Holding Out

For the dreamer in a dark night.

Careful with the dark, now; adding to it rarely helps anyone to see––at least not until it is complete and total, but then we’re talking new levels of perception. Finding these, one might notice: though the stars still faintly flickering are distant, there is a way to take root among them––after enough practice in losing it all while still managing to hold the first posture in what might be the organizing element in every dance that has ever reminded a body back to what it was for, to throw it forward into what it does when it moves with the wide-eyed clarity of one who remembers being blind. I mean how it reaches and keeps reaching, toward the next living dream.

A Centering Moment

Body and web.

Thread upon thread to bind us, forward and back in time, and no reason will save you. Given enough movement, a body becomes so unreasonably wound up in it that an old impulse returns, to believe the smallest movement of one affects the fate of all, and what follows is more touch and the grief that comes with it. The child’s glorious maximalism: no master of any fate, only servant to a call that defies translation, which is bound to make its listener seem foolish at best, and probably mad. But there it is again, the music of vibrating strings, resounding.

***

Inspired by Howard Thurman: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”