Paleontology

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One grieving, mourning moment
Codafied, crystallized, screaming torment
Boxed in the walled-in cold shape of my soul
Focusing here so I don't lose control
Paleontology digs in this moment
Scratching the surface so no one else owns it
Something that's true about stark contradiction
A need unacknowledged that bleeds in affliction
Who could've told of unthinkable shapes?
Who but myself with defenses agape?
Mortification cites ultimate being
Shapes that inscribe me are finally breathing

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Where there's smoke, there's fire

Where there's smoke, there's fire
And fears mean a liar
But how many layers
Does it take to inspire

the truth? Comes in a place of love
How few of us rise above
Today's haunting demons to find them composed of

Our youth: when we learned to hurt ourself
Placing self love out of reach, on a shelf
The last book we study:
The hand we were dealt.

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somehow, I agree with them both

all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. 

Julian of Norwich

all, dear reader, is not going to be fine. Even If we all agreed with the saints and the prophets, all would not be fine. For we would still be mortal, partial, suffering poor creatures, not very intelligent and never the authors of our best hope.

Wendell Berry

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Well when you put it that way...

the government should only be big enough to annihilate any country and (If necessary) every country, to spy on its citizens and on other governments, to keep big secrets, and to see to the health and happiness of large corporations. A government thus reduced will be almost too small to notice and will require almost no taxes and spend almost no money.

Wendell Berry,  from"The joy of sales resistance" in Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community

Soap bubble

Soap bubble,
Where did you come from?
You magically appeared
In the course of washing my hands
Taking care of something I needed to do
I looked up and you were there
To brighten my day
Your perfect roundness,
Colors shimmering on your surface
Despite this grey day
How did the breath
That keeps you alive and afloat
Get inside you?
Soap bubble
Where did you go?
I looked down for a moment
To fix something with the water and
Having been uplifted by your presence
Looked up to find you again
But you were gone
Vanished as unexpectedly as you appeared

How can something so vivid in front of us
In fact be so fragile?

impasse and dark night

Night in John of the Cross is the progressive purification and transformation of the human person through what we cherish or desire and through what gives us security and support. We are affected by darkness, therefore, where we are most deeply involved and committed, and in what we love and care for most. Love makes us vulnerable, and it is love itself and its development that precipitate darkness in oneself and in the 'other.'

from "Impasse and Dark Night" 

by Constance Fitzgerald, O.C.D., 

in Living With Apocalypse, Harper and Row, 1984.

Particulars or waves

So tenuous
Hanging by threads
We go through our ups and downs
But some dips there are no coming back from

The digestive tract didn't have to stop working
The chemo had given us such hope
She took this walk with me
Through the arboretum
Even though she was tired and had to sit down
We rode the wave for 15 months
But one too many days unable to keep liquids down
And we switched to TPN
She dipped too low
And now there is no coming back for her.

She didn't have to get cancer
But she did have to die someday
Would it have been any easier later? Maybe
But it would still have hurt a lot, just the same.

Just like I didn't have to make those particular bad decisions
That led to the end
But the problems behind it all
Had to come out eventually

Light sometimes behaves as a particle,
Other times as waves

Electrons, like reasons, exist in particular whenever we look for them,
But the rest of the time they are infinite waves, undulating in the background of space-time.

What exists, exists. What must happen must happen.
We just never know where, or how.

Dopelganger

All mythic creatures have their genesis in very real dynamics of human relationships and emotions. The dopelganger traditionally is a shapeshifter, a creature that can take on different forms or appearances for purposes of deceiving, escaping, or attacking a foe.
One mirror of the dopelganger in our lives is at the level of our unresolved emotions themselves. Lingering grief, bitterness, mistrust shows up in current relationships, having taken the form of our current partner or other relations. We can meet the familiar one in new people, picking up where we left off - but at the point of breakthrough, when we imagine a healing connection is made, then the veil is pierced and we find ourselves with a stranger; the familiar essence has moved on... we can fall into wandering after it.
Longing for intimacy lost with parents can be displaced into demands made on current relations. Anger can flare up out of proportion to the present. We fight the dopelganger, but in the midst of the attack, he slips away again, and we hurt those we never meant to.
In current relationships, as well as displaced unmet needs, there are seeds of truth from the present. Yet eventually, the truth of presence can shift into longing for aspects of a partner before not as prominent: a sincere heart in our beloved- after the dopelganger's brief appearance to peel back scars - becomes a phantom we can no longer access. The memory of something truly good becomes submerged in forms that never dominated in their presence before - such as physical longing amplified in absence. And again, we grasp at emptiness as the dopelganger hides his true identity from us.
Efforts to track down the original being, once lost, becomes a frustrating chase of life, as we seek to reconnect with the true identity of the shapeshifter.

On the path, we may encounter substances or passtimes the dopelganger temporarily inhabits. But as soon as we start to feel relief, he leaves that form as well, rendering it lifeless to us, and again our eyes scan the horizons for his new incarnation.
Inevitably, the chase leads us to unexpected destinations. Eventually, through frustration and desperation, we reach a place of hopelessness, of diminished searching, and we are forced to sit with all the longing, the angst, the anger and the grief. We sit alone, and through our patience, we find that the presence is with us. Somehow, without an object. We cannot see the dopelganger's form, but here he is, as present as the wind.
In our depths. Beneath our compulsions and resistance. He is with us. He has been with us all along. In ourselves, we find what we have been running toward. In ourselves, we find what we have been hiding from.
The dopelganger is in us. The dopelganger is with us. Traditionally, the only way to avoid the shifting of a dopelganger is to stay with him constantly. Look away not even for a moment, or he will escape, into another once again.
We must embrace that which is with us, in us, and not let go. The feelings we have that deserve validation; the pained circumstances which deserve mourning rather than action to change. When we leave the turbulent reality within ourselves for a second - when we look for a rescue, rather than calming the wild animal ourselves - then the shapeshifter slips away, leading us again on a chase that can last a lifetime... but which always arrives back with ourselves.

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Quotes on patience

Above all, trust the slow work of the spirit.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown,
something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability--
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you,
your ideas mature gradually--let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don't try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of your tomorrow.

Who can say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be?
Give yourself the benefit of believing that the Spirit is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of felling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

 

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Can you be patient unil the mud settles and the water is clear? 

Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself?

Stephen Mitchell

kind of like Truth

The acorn falls to the cement.
The crow lands beside it.
He places one foot on the nut, and pecks at it with his nose.
He hears distant traffic and picks the large acorn up in his small beak. He looks around. Satisfied that the traffic is far away, he places the nut down and pecks at it some more, holding it steady with his right foot.
He wants what is inside. But it will take work to get to it.
He contemplates flying up and dropping it to the concrete again. But another crow swoops in from behind and lands near him.
He picks up the acorn and flies away.
He is not ready to share this prize.
Although he holds it now, he does not even know how to access it yet himself.

Every line a measured verse

Sky that moves each step I walk
Shy I left you yet I talk
Breath that deepens, anxious less
Losing fear of meaningless
Friends with distance as it should
Leaving always saying I would
Sad about the other things
worrying less tomorrow brings
Holding truer inner sense
Relax brewing recompense
Captivating but ignored
Sallow missing unexplored
Bitter grief on nightly rounds
Crying always newer sounds
More amazed with wider eyes
Clearer answers fewer lies