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...
The Muses are fickle. The gods are capricious. Inspiration is untrustworthy, and our own feelings are even more mercurial. The real miracle isn't a lightning strike. Neither transcendence nor divine intervention. It happens in the monotony of showing up. In the drudgery of doing the work. Regardless of the muses. Regardless of the gods. Regardless of inspiration. Regardless of how we feel.
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.
Happiness isn't a shell game. It isn't three card monte. It's not a con staged by a dealer and a shill. It's not something you have to keep your eye on. Not something you have to follow or find. It's looking at the cards you were dealt. The ones you were given. The ones in your hand, and playing them the best you can.
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...
No matter how weathered. No matter how lonely or scarred. We are a marvel of architecture and engineering. These self-healing wounds. This reshaping heart. This living ghost of who we've been and who we are. The capacity to be taken down to almost nothing, to be rebuilt, to be renovated, to be renewed.
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.
We're told to climb, to stretch, to grasp, to cling. But, to where? To what? To whom? On the other side of everything we've ever been through, what is waiting for us? What do we hope to find there? What is calling us home? What is the home we're calling to? At some point we have ask ourselves why it is we reach, if we ever hope to reach what we pursue...
@jredlund@bookstodon well said! It's not only the things that we want that can be empty the reasons we want them can be empty to. If we are ever to get anywhere, we must first get beyond ourselvea.
Maybe you know the feeling. Maybe you know what it's like. To compose a life of scraps and fragments. To live in jumbled lines. Between stitches and tight sentences. In the texture of torn out paper, crumpled and dismayed. All our dead darlings, balled up on the floor.
That's the funny thing about real life, isn't it? We're either always denied the things we want or discovering that we never really wanted them at all. Did you think it wasn't true? You can tell me I'm wrong, but you know it too.
Any moment is every moment. Any day is everyday. What you do with this one, how you hold it, how you view it, how you put it to use, says all you'll ever need to about how'll spend all of them, about who you are, about what'll do, about what you'll be. Whether you'll become something different, or whether you'll stay the same...
Any introvert worth their weight in cancelled plans will tell you, it's easier to slip out early when you've learned to sneak in late. The best part of every guilty pleasure, is the pleasure you get from not feeling guilty when you know nobody sees...
We tell ourselves that we're just one discovery, one uncovering, one goal, one task, one accomplishment, one thing, away from happiness, from contentment, from satisfaction, from rest, from peace. But it never comes, never arrives. We never meet the need...
There is a thin line between persistence and delusion, between consistency and insanity, and you can't ever seem to find it.
Camus was right to say that one must imagine Sisyphus happy, that each time the boulder tumbles down, he walks to meet it with something like a smile, you only wish he had better explained how.
Often creative blocks come from harboring a falsity, a dishonesty. We hide a part of ourselves, aspects of who we are, the things we really want to talk about, the things we really want to say, the things we really mean. We deny our own interests, our own intentions, our own curiosity. Real creative freedom stems from truthfulness, from radical honesty, from authenticity.
We seek things. Not for the sake of attaining them. Not in the hopes of actually having them, but only in an effort of avoiding something else. We seek company to avoid solitude, to avoid loneliness. We want power to avoid impotence and vulnerability. Financial success to avoid the feeling of having less, of being less. We try to grab as much as we can to avoid letting go.
From threshold to threshold, we step through entry ways and rooms. Closets, doors, and walls. A residence covered in night. Present and estranged. Familiar and astray. We trace the edges of our openness. The grain of our enclosed space. The parts that have collapsed. Those that remain. The ones that can still be saved.
Moving on starts with mourning, with grief, with sackcloth and ashes. A burial. A long black veil. You will have to say goodbye to the possibility that things could have been different, that things could have ended another way. The things that never were, will never be. Everything that was, will never be again. Handfuls of dirt dropped on to a casket. You close your eyes, take a breath, and walk away from the grave.
@doomvega@bookstodon thank you so much! I'm really glad this meant something to you. It means so much to me that it did. Thank you for reading! I appreciate it more than I can say!
You sit at your desk. You read what's been written. You stop. You stare. And then, you start to wander, aimlessly. You start to wonder, purposefully. We let ourselves get lost. We "court digression", Judith Kitchen says. We look to be led astray.
@writerlane@bookstodon I'm excited to read it. I've been interested in starting it for a long time, just kept putting it off. Found a copy today in the bargain section, couldn't say no, apparently the time has come.
What is there to grasp? To what can we cling? When the only thing to grip is the emptiness, the vacuity? We hold on to the absence, the missing-ness, the unavailability. We keep a vigil for what what has passed, for what we can't repeal. For all the things we've lost. All the steps we can't retrace.
