Somewhere a black bear
has just risen from sleep and is staring down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness of early spring
I think of her, her four black fists flicking the gravel, her tongue
like a red fire
touching the grass, the cold water.
There is only one question:
how to love this world…
Sometimes I leap overboard and think things like, Im only going to read Mary Oliver for the rest of my life, because some writers have it all, so why dilute clarity?
In the twelve houses of astrology, the second determines values and aesthetics. Think Plato and Venus. If those essences have no meaning for you, consider what is most loved and most lovely in your life. Imagine that the location of a constellation in the heavens may be the reason I value ideas, philosophies, poets, writers, and books. Imagine that a single living soul reflects an individual relationship between earth and stars. A true north. Imagine.
A long time ago, I dreamed I met Jimi Hendrix and when I saw him I knew he was The One for me. I was meant for him. He was meant for me. I said to him, you are The One I am meant to be with. He said no, he wasnt but he would make love to me just once. Make love he said. He came close. He towered over me. He took both his hands to his chest and reached inside his body and opened the flesh and bone to reveal his heart, big and beating. The blood. His viscera. The beautiful brown body opened up to show me his heart, a human heart, and his body, a human body. It was beautiful and horrible, such an excruciating intimacy. I understood when he said, Im too much for you. Ive never forgotten that dream.
Due to indoctrination and cultural conditioning, the tendency is to view a lifetime from beginning to end. In the beginning…in the middle…the end. Another perspective that may be gathering momentum is to look from the bottom up and the top down where the end could be anywhere along a columnar ray, the flight path of ones true north. Events, realizations, progressions, all stacked one on top of another. A vertical perspective from earth to the stars, one great stack of difficulty and love making, of dreams and visions sparking along a column of time. This moment Now liable to collapse into another moment Then and suddenly the coincidence is a window blown open for seeing what this time between heaven and earth is for.
Consider that each and everyone is in their own private place and time simply because no one is born at the exact place and time as any other. A true north and no two people for whom true is the same. A true marvel. Each lifetime an arc of exclusively embedded time-space all the way from heaven to earth, pointing to the exquisite intimacy between our planet and our marvellous stars.
Comes the last and final collapse. Each and every point along the vertical path instantly collapsing into one single centre of attention. Death. Where from that centre we may go can only be imagined.
I once had a dog named Sam and he died during a loud tormenting storm. He never liked storms as I do. When he went I cried for all the times I had not loved him well and I felt a part of me leave with him as he passed. Meanwhile part of him stayed here with me, but the part gone over with him had no comprehension of his whereabouts even though I was there and in him. Now I believe we have utterly no idea of what lies beyond this life, our minds havent the capacity to understand it from where and as we are here. Silence and attentiveness seems the best preparation for the inconceivable beyond.
In a fleeting vision, I see my brother and I as children, holding hands, and flying into a bright white unknowable something. Part of me is gone with him and the part left here with me is intricate to embody. He was in life and is in death so massively good.
Im making sense of a dream I had thirty years ago. That dream caving in on the news of my brothers death, his body opened up by a wild animal. Entrails exposed. Body parts chomped. His face clawed off. An ear retrieved later from the stomach of the beast.
Afterwards, he came into someones dream, silently smiling and carrying a box. His eyes above that smile never leaving the dreamer as he circled his vehicle.
We are opening the box, revealing details impossible to organize, spinning in our childhoods that were not fully accounted for.
The dreamer wonders at the meaning of the smile, so silent and true.
We die as we are. For him, a quiet goodness, sitting on a mountain top, weak with age that came too early, and his body aching from the love of using it. He was alone and for the first time he was happy in that. The silent grief let go of. Anger that had been selflessly held back dispersed. What but a bear could match the magnitude of his feelings released, what wild intensity could flat line the accumulation of sensations suppressed for the sake of a virtuous life? An adult male, grown to a great size, living just long enough to taste the flesh of a man, and that man set free by the beast.
Animals may be waking up as we keep on sleeping. Lounging in lockdowns has made us wimpy while animals returned to their rightful places on the earth. Turtles on the beach. Leopards in the savanna. See 2020 The Year the Earth Changed. Creatures were briefly free to live what has been taken from them. Maybe they are waking up and arent going to take it anymore. Orcas. Sharks. Whales. Lions. Tigers. Bears. We keep hunting. We keep eating. We keep sleeping.
We are being consumed by a desire not our own.
On hearing the news, my heart was ploughed open with grief, as if bear claws reached into my chest and the pain was excruciating. Since that awful opening all I want to do for the rest of my life is love everything and everyone. How strange to experience this longing, bursting as it did out of the racking pain. Claws reaching into my heart is more pain than I can stay focused on, and Im unable to trace the feeling to the depth charge it bursts from.
He opened countless doors for me, never dictating and always gently guiding, What about this, Jess? Now the last portal hangs agape, a heart torn open to feel and know and contain more of what it means to be human, in my heart, in a body, in this life.
Damnit, dont cry. Just do it!
How will I do it? How will I love everyone and everything?
Through Gods grace, I am told.
God or lover, it will be the one thats meant for me.
In Christianity, agape (/ɑːˈɡɑːpeɪ, ˈɑːɡəˌpeɪ, ˈæɡə-/;[1][2] from Ancient Greek ἀγάπη (agápē)) is "the highest form of love, charity" and "the love of God for man and of man for God".[3] This is in contrast to philia, brotherly love, or philautia, self-love, as it embraces a deep and profound sacrificial love that transcends and persists regardless of circumstance. The verb form goes as far back as Homer, translated literally as affection, as in "greet with affection" and "show affection for the dead".[4] Other ancient authors have used forms of the word to denote love of a spouse or family, or affection for a particular activity, in contrast to eros (an affection of a sexual nature).
In the New Testament, it refers to the covenant love of God for humans, as well as the human reciprocal love for God; the term necessarily extends to the love of one's fellow human beings.[5]
Such beautiful imagery Jess ! Stellar writing!