or is it despair (oh that word again)
or maybe weariness or wariness.
How about sad? How about joyless?
How about depressed or even melancholy?
Not with it, perhaps. Not engaged. Not connected.
Adrift. Grasping but only half-heartedly.
**
So, I went in search of a book I once turned
to often as I tried to work through the tedious
and the pedestrian aspects of my mundane life.
I found it. Here are some things I found inside:
**
As we live we are transmitters of life and when we fail
to transmit life, life fails to flow through us...
And if, as we work, we can transmit life into our work,
still more life rushes into us to compensate, to be ready
and we ripple with life through the days...
Give and it shall be given unto you is still the truth
about life. But giving life is not so easy. It doesn't mean
handing it out to some mean fool or letting the living
dead eat you up...It means kindling the life force
where it was not, even if it's only in the whiteness of a
washed pocket-handkerchief.
D. H. Lawrence
Complete Poems
My bookmark for that page was a bumper sticker that says:
"BUT TO LIVE OUTSIDE THE LAW, YOU MUST BE HONEST"
BOB DYLAN
There was a note, in my handwriting, on the back of said,
obviously unused, bumper sticker:
Dylan
May 1997
Beale St. Music Festival
Memphis, TN
**
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and
try to love the questions themselves...Do not now seek
the answers which cannot be given you because you
would not be able to live them and the point is to live
everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will
then gradually, without noticing it, live along some
distant day into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet
**
On that page was a yellow sticky pad note thingee. It contains
the following info:
Sanctuary, Inc.
(phone number)
Florida Locations
1-***-***-****
Palm Beach Co. Domestic Assualt Center
Harmony House
1-***-***-****
I guess I will throw it away today. I remember writing
the note and why I wrote it. My sister's ex was psychologically
abusing her. She couldn't get help anywhere. The shelters
were for battered (physically) women.
So many years ago now.
**
I am afoot with my vision...I tramp a perpetual journey.
Walt Whitman
Song of the Open Road
**
Miracles seem to rest, not so much upon faces or voices or healing
power coming suddenly near to us from far off, but upon our
perceptions being made finer so that for a moment our eyes can
see and our ears can hear that which is about us always.
Willa Cather
**
I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring
out all kinds of things that lie buried in my heart.
Anne Frank
The Diary of a Young Girl
**
The necessary thing is, after all, but this: solitude, great inner
solitude. Going into oneself and for hours meeting no one--
this one must be able to attain.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Letter to a Young Poet
**
In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself
within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.
Dante
The Divine Comedy
**
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in
which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say
to yourself, "I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing
that comes along." You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
Eleanor Roosevelt
You Learn by Living
**
World, I am your slow guest, one of the common things that
move in the sun and have close, reliable friends in the earth,
in the air, in the rock.
William Stafford
Allegiances
**
Lie back daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out in the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead man's
float is face down. You will dive and
swim soon enough where the tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe me,
when you tire of the long thrash
to your island, lie up and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember, when fear
cramps your heart, what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back and the sea will hold you.
Phillip Booth
"First Lesson"
2 comments:
Apathy. You call it indifference. But it's apathy. For me, at least. And I struggle with it alot lately. It concerns me greatly that I can go for days without caring about anybody or anything. I almost posted this on my blog last night then thought better of it:
I don't give a damn.
I am a failed transmitter.
I think my problem is that I don't have any questions to love. Or live.
My biggest problem is that, as Anne said:
I want to write, but MORE than that.
Just more.
Yep, I'm with you on the sense of disconnection.
I watched Running with Scissors last night. It's an amazing goddamned movie. Have you seen it?
I misread the Whitman quote. Already wrote that misreading into a poem.
Which is what I always damned do. See something, hear something, feel something or imagine I feel something and....
write a poem.
Not sure that's necessarily the best response but it's what I do.
Guess I'll finish the poem and make a coffee cake. Plum.
Thanks for this post, Maggie. I needed it.
Yes, apathy. Apathetic, I am, and even sometimes pretty damn pathetic.
Life is certainly not all gloom and doom. It just seems harder to acknowledge the joyful moments. They are so short-lived. But I think it is not how long they last that should matter. Just that they do happen. Thinking of them helps me at times like this.
I read an article about Running With Scissors when I was visiting a friend in Lexington a few months ago. I also picked up her copy and read the first couple of chapters, but she had not finished the book so I didn't bring it home with me. I plan to finish it. Do you know the controversy brewing over the book--the so-called memoir? Not quite like the one over--hmmm....what was that book? A Million Little Pieces or something. The reviews of the movie were favorable, so I'll be sure to rent it soon.
I wonder why we struggle so with this apathy? With this sense that we are, as you say, failed transmitters.
A plum coffe cake sounds yummy though I am not much of a plum eater. I bet it tastes great in the coffee cake. I haven't made a coffee cake in so very long. Think I'll have to do that this week.
Whatever you do today, Laurel, just remember that you do have some questions to love and to live. They're just being elusive right now.
Damned elusive questions. Make your presence known!
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