I am overdue on a number of things, one of which is calling my mom, who is in Russia. I miss her.
It has been a difficult time, emotionally. Perhaps it is time to turn to some literary friends I have acquired over the years. And so I do... to one man who is always with me, because of his words - well you guessed who it is:
..Love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away, you write, and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.
And if what is near you is far away, then your vastness is already among the stars and is very great; be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend.
Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.
Avoid providing material for the drama, that is always stretched tight between parent and children; it uses up much of the children's strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it doesn't comprehend.
Don't ask for any advice from them and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.
(rainer maria rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)
I am learning a lot these days - about myself, my limits, desires and true needs.
The good thing is that the music is flowing freely - I have a full album's material's worth on my iPhone - and that's just my iPhone.
I feel like a phase is ending and another beginning, but I am still in between. It's not the most comfortable place to be, because I like certainty. But perhaps that's just it: learning to be in that place, with patience - that is the lesson.
It appears to me that many of the people I know are having a similar experience. Or perhaps, once again, I am just seeing the world through my own little private lens, that just so happens to be a bit foggy these days.
I am doing, however, some good work. There are some interesting covers in progress, as well as originals. I am also wrangling with software and cables. Eck! I hate cables. But, alas, they are necessary in sound engineering of any kind.
Here is a bit of a cover I am putting together. It is a French song I have loved for a while now. I think I'll do another version with English lyrics... well, I'll have to WRITE them first, but it will be a pleasure. And then I'll have to remix it for sure, it's too gorgeous of a melody, it has to go over beats, too.
It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.
Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing.
That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was.
We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens.
And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside.
The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on, when it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to other people), we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being.
And that is necessary. It is necessary - and toward this point our development will move, little by little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own. People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us.
It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before found anything like that inside them.
Just as people for a long time had a wrong idea about the sun's motion, they are even now wrong about the motion of what is to come. The future stands still, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space.
Yes, that is definitely me today.
Mission for the rest of 2012 is to learn to walk a careful line between smugness and a sort of magnanimous noblesse oblige. And own it.
