You can huff and you can puff all you want, but at some point you start to learn, that no matter the wall, no matter the fall, no matter how many horses, no matter how many men, somethings can't be put back together again. Home is where the acceptance starts. You change your clothes, you step outside, you take a breath, and you enter the world anew.
It's wonderful to watch an artist or writer at work, to see them operate within the framework of their well honed craft. But, it's an unimaginable and refreshing joy to see them at play. To watch them experimenting. To see them searching. It's the reminder that we could and should do the same...
When everything is a sentence fragment. A thought un-punctuated, unresolved, inconclusive and incomplete. It's on the tip of your but it escapes you. Something just out of reach. An ellipsis open-ended. More to say and do. When nothing's finished, when nothing's done, you're closest to the truth; nothing ever has been, nothing ever is...
It takes some getting used to, when you're in the end-times of your own existence. When you only have one fuck left to give, and if it goes you'll find yourself on a street corner shouting "the end is near!"
Some thoughts on the things that take place in stages. Things like denial. Like anger. Like bargaining. Like depression and acceptance. Things like grief.
We learn to live in little rooms. In small spaces. Tightening places. With an ever narrowing gaze. A claustrophobia so thick you can taste the weight of it. You don’t know how you got here, and you don’t know how to get out. The entry is invisible, and the exit is even harder to find. https://duanetoops.substack.com/p/there-is-a-door
There is something really interesting in this reversal of perspective, a shift in orientation, a subjectivity moved to the periphery, given to an object, a living desire within the inertness of things...
Something happens like transformation. Like transubstantiation. Sacrament. Communion. Sacredity. Something happens when you take this bread that is our bodies; broken, warm, and needed. When you take this cup filled with each other, poured out for one another. Aged, refined, distilled. When you do this in remembrance of our time together, the time we're given, our time here.
Routine is a way to reclaim novelty. A ritual continually practiced with attention and awareness, constancy and stability reveals the subtle ways in which everything is not only always different but always differing...
Between desire and retreat, between the terror and the taste, what is there to grasp? To what can we cling? Perhaps nothing other than this moment, the fact that it passes, that sometimes it's sweet, that you are something that breathes.
We let ourselves feel the bigness of everything. The emptiness, the longing, the ache. The foundation, the structure, the bones. Our sensitivity is a strength. The reality of our condition is not always painless, but at least it's something we can embrace. A somatic system of understanding. Something we can touch. Something with texture. Something we can learn to face.