A color enhanced image of Jupiter from the bottom, courtesy NASA
Back in the furnace, although it was only 107F yesterday, mild by comparison to the 118 and 120 degree days we had before I left. Like almost everyone here, of course, I talk about the temperature a lot.
An epic ton of reflections on the journey are probably on their way, with names changed to protect both innocent and guilty, but there's too much to do here first-- a talk next week at an international conference, packing to move on August 1, ripping CDs to get rid of a lot of them, getting back into the lab, working out my finances for the year, etc. One of these times I'm going to take a trip after I have *completely settled* everything in my life so that when I return I have nothing to do but grieve the fact that the trip is over or lie around being glad to be home.
By mysterious means, my heart turned from narrow to expansive while I was traveling and seeing people. In whatever ways I was able to, I began to take risks again, including some of the biggest risks of all involving the most important choices we make: how will we spend our time? With whom will we spend it? How open and vulnerable do we want to be? How seriously do we want to take our feelings? What kind of love are we capable of pushing our luck into? The long-standing flirtation and mutual admiration with someone who has suddenly become wildly important exploded like throwing a lit match on wood that's been left to dry in the lower Sonoran for years. That experience has lent an even greater expansiveness to the journey from New Jersey back to Arizona, and is an astonishing mystery in itself.
Of course, love being a verb and all, navigating this situation is going to be an...interesting process. By outward appearances, the practical world looks on the connection and laughs. Ha, laughs the practical world. But stranger things have happened by far, and if falling in love with and loving someone in practice, in action, even in the midst of non-action, ever operated in practical terms, I'd like to hear about it. Cultivating being present in combination with not being in a hurry to do anything-- just stopping the monkey mind and giving this extraordinary experience room to breathe-- that's promising.
Meanwhile the work that has launched this season in hell continues. No love for another, no matter how much of a healing balm and frankly goddamn fucking miracle of joy, is cure for the ills and delusions that are underneath all the pain of the past few months and the sub-floor upon sub-floor of the abandoned soulhouse at its root. My heart, while enthusiastically expansive, has also been insisting on a continuity of healing, on being heard in full, on finding joy no matter the circumstances, through being fully tended.
Buceo profundo!
Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
ReplyDeleteBY RICHARD WILBUR
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;
Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks
From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,
And cries,
“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”
Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.”