The Beautiful Answer

Just A Few More Posts Left

Just three more posts after this one until I’ve officially kept The Beautiful Answer alive for a full year. Wow. 

As I get closer and closer to what this actually feels like for me, I’m happy that I managed to stick with something on a daily basis for pretty much the entire year. Four posts were either skipped because I was sick or traveling, and one because I just didn’t feel like writing anything that day. 

One thing this blog has definitely hammered home for me is the idea of impermanence. Sure, it’s easy to grasp the concept intellectually, that things don’t last. That as each breath leaves our body, one more moment is moving into the past. But it’s another thing to write down your experience every day for 365 days in a row, watching things that annoyed or amazed you yesterday move into the past as well. 

Sometimes I marvel at why people like blogs so much. They offer a place to vent, or keep private thoughts, but only if you don’t mind they’re not really being all that private. For me this has been as much about shifting my perspective on a daily basis, of making that a true spiritual practice so I get used to it, than anything else. 

After a few more posts are written, I have no idea what I will do. And that in itself is a pretty cool place of freedom to be in. 

Sleeeeeeeeeeeep

Sleep, I want to write an ode to you

Your softness against my cheek 

Your taking my consciousness elsewhere

I don’t know where it goes, and I don’t care

Because all I want to do is sleep, sleep, sleep 

Sleeeeeeeeeeeep

Until I can’t remember why I was tired in the first place

Redefining Love

Love is one of those words I sometimes try not to say. Not that I don’t love the idea of love, or the many and varied things is represents. It’s just that it’s been pretty well co-opted by the greeting card companies and the New Agers, until it’s become virtually meaningless, or so gooey and devoid of actual feeling that it resembles the cover of a romance novel more than, say, the ferocity of a mother lifting a car off her baby.

I found this poem today, when searching for a verse to engrave inside my husband’s and my new wedding bands (he lost his around a month ago, and we agreed to both get new ones). It’s be Rumi, and goes like this:

I am your moon and your moonlight too/I am your flower garden and your water too/I have come all this way, eager for you/Without shoes or shawl/I want you to laugh/To kill all your worries/To love you/To nourish you.

It’s one of those poems that makes me want to fall to my knees in gratitude, that someone from the 13th century, in a country I’ve never been to, somehow gets the way I love, the way I want to love my partner, and the way he loves me. We do make each other laugh, a lot, and want to obliterate all that hurts the other while providing spiritual, mental, emotional and physical nourishment.

But I can’t throw the word love out with the bathwater, so I tried reframing it. I saw it in a word cloud, trying to give the word broader borders. It had to have softer connotations, like cuddling and holding and kissing in the rain. But it had to capture that wilder, crazy side of love, the part that feels out of control, or borderless. Ferocious, tenuous, warrior-like and true joined the cloud, until the word had so many possible permutations that it felt like something so integral to our being that it simply can’t not exist. Like water, like air, like love.

Transcendence To Go

Sometimes you find transcendence when you’re not even looking for it. I love it when that happens. The last couple of days haven’t been easy. They’ve taught me a lot, and caused me to set a new long-term course in my life. So bad news/good news there.

Once I experience pain, I’m so busy wanting to feel better, trying to work through whatever’s made me fall off the happiness wagon, that I don’t expect anything. I hope that the painful stuff starts to dissipate, and my worn-out eyes start to focus on what’s good about my life again. It’s like I’m a giant focusing telescope, and I have to swing myself around to face a completely different landscape.

So when I find something that at first seems accidental, it’s like the universe has sent me a little gift. That’s what happened when I ran across this poem in a magazine today: 

“What is it you want to change? Your hair, your face, your body? Why? For God is in love with all those things and He Might weep when they are gone.”

— St. Catherine of Siena

It felt like someone had hosed me down with liquid nitrogen. I froze, feeling my blood shock my veins. My perceptions froze as well, as time seemed to slow down and the song on the radio began to assume a grander sort of importance. With all my senses hanging in the balance, I saw beyond the moment — to healing, to new moments, to challenges, love, acceptance and total integration. I saw beauty and forgiveness, and true understanding of what these times of doubt really are — opportunities to continue. Nothing more, nothing less.

Parents F*ck Us Up

I love the poem, “This Be the Verse,” by Philip Larkin, which goes something like this: 

“They fuck you up/ Your mum and dad./They may not mean to, but they do./They fill you with the faults they had/ And add some extra, just for you.”

I think about this frequently, and it’s come up again in the fallout from the Casey Antony trial. So many of us feel that we have all the answers for how to parent, whether you’re talking about a child or a pet. We feel that we would never make the same kinds of mistakes that other people would, and that our methods would inevitably produce a little genius, or at the very least a very happy dog or cat.

I don’t really feel like writing about Casey Anthony again, but I am interested in the idea that most of us feel that we know better than other people. Where does that come from, and how can we become more aware of the prejudice we may unconsciously carry about other people? How can we cultivate tolerance and compassion in a world that’s so freakin’ judgmental?

To reframe this, I began to think about my own parents. Imperfect, definitely. Did they do the best they could? Probably. I mean, I wasn’t there, at least as an adult person yet. Did they bring me into the world, regardless, and give me human life? Um, hell yeah.

Ding. Dark feelings about judgements lifted, and my heart opened in a new way. I didn’t care about what others were doing or thinking because I had my life, which is precious and fragile and all too brief.