My last attempt at “being”

It’s not so simple. This we know. It comes and it goes, circling back on itself, becoming nothing as much as it was something. And we are in the something of it. Which is the deepest, most vicious dream– one that we blink out of, that fades behind us, slowly, inevitably. 

But knowing the end, let’s be sure that we are where we are. Here, in the beautiful living of it. 

Beneath all of the solid things– the identities we are born into, the ones we take on, the choices we make to guard them, or leave them behind– undercutting all of this, are the patterns. Think of the patterns like the ripples after a large explosion, the aftershock that reverberates through time. This is what the scientists study. The wrinkles in wood, or in jade. The rhythms of your period. The cycle of health, and what it reveals about you. The turbulence and buoyancy and decay. 

I feel so softly towards her that it is hard for me to write about it. 

I went to her house late last night, because I couldn’t bear to think of her alone there, the way she is. Maybe it cuts like it does because she will be me too. She is in her last years. She looked so beautiful standing there, so regal and delicate in her nightgown, her hair pinned up in translucent coils. She tried to give me one of her hair pins. I didn’t know how to use it. It didn’t fit into my living. I left it with her. 

She led me upstairs to her room. She wanted me to take down a painting she had made, depicting the Kosovo War. A cluster of refugees stood around the tree of life, their faces turning expectantly to the viewer. 

“Look at all of them,” She said, breathing life into the canvas again. Her colors were so rich that they seemed almost childish. “They were just like you and me, regular people in regular clothes.”

There were boys wearing sweatshirts and baseball caps, and women wearing lipstick and earrings. Them being ordinary made them look real. 

She wanted me to take the painting down, so that she could take a picture of it for her friend. 

There was a small cup sitting next to her bed, a yogurt container. She eats the good kind, with the red letters, from Bulgaria. And she eats the big containers with the vanilla cow on it too. She told me matter-of-factly that when she has to throw up at night, she can’t always get out of her big bed. So she keeps the empty yogurt cup on the nightstand for when she needs to. 

I heard once that when you break up with someone, you experience the process of separating as the person you are, and the person you are with. 

In the same way, you will die as you lived. If you want to know what death will be like, then look to how you are living. 

Not that she is exactly dying yet. But she sees the grand opening unfolding towards her, the threshold, and she waits for it as she always has. Except now much of her life has paled in comparison to the end. She waits for it as she always has. Very prettily and quietly. Sweet and unassuming and weak and careful. What a thing to wait so patiently for. 

Old age is beyond many of us for now. We don’t know its weight, its textures. There are patterns that still have not revealed themselves , but it is still something to consider. The way that you will remain yourself through all of it. How life does not strip you of who you are, but rather unfolds you into it. How it is a series of journeys and how you are the person you become as you take them. 

There is a central experience of our being that articulates itself outwards, that forms itself through the details of our days. This drawing is a map of how we try to live. And this is where I want to meet you today and always. Not in understanding, because I don’t think we are meant to understand, but by opening room for perception, articulating the depths of our experience through how it manifests in every moment. 

I try to live that way. It’s funny to have this platform when I know so many people without one that are better at that kind of living than I am. The kind of living that is seeing everything with my eyes clear and open, and keeping them open, feeling the subtle waves for what they are. My practice is not deceiving myself. Seeing everything, without looking away. 

As usual I have not solved the great cosmogenic myth. But as is my way, I suppose, I have treaded lightly around it. 

I feel that when I can write about something beautifully, when I can decorate a God in pictures and sweet imaginative visions, that I am loving it. And maybe in loving it, I am loving myself.

And loving you. 

And understanding in the way that I am meant to.

At the bottom of this texts, you’ll find my responses to thirty-ish questions about “being.” I don’t know if I’ve actually answered any of them, because the dialogue is ongoing. Because unfortunately for me I am a participant in all of this being as much as anyone else. 

But I felt I had gotten us somewhere by the end of it. 

One question I cannot answer:

Does the circle end? 

-sotce