Giving Over

[Image: “Painted Walkway, Frenchtown,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) The Frenchtown neighborhood, within easy walking distance of the building where I work, has been gradually remaking itself in recent years — resisting not just the slide into despair which might be considered “typical” of inner-city neighborhoods, but also the pull of gentrification and, at the neighborhood’s fringes, the appetite of a nearby university for ever more student housing. Frenchtown’s “giving over” is not a passive resignation, a surrender, but an active, happy return to spirited youthfulness: the things which make life worth living.]

From whiskey river:

It’s something people don’t discuss, because it’s something most people are aware of only as a general crisis of sense of inadequacy, or helpless dependence, or pointless loneliness, or a sense of not having a strong enough ego to meet and master inner storms that come from an unexpected angle. But not many people realise that it is, in fact, the suffering of the child inside them. Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it. So everybody develops a whole armour of secondary self, the artificially constructed being that deals with the outer world, and the crush of circumstances. And when we meet people this is what we usually meet. And if this is the only part of them we meet we’re likely to get a rough time, and to end up making ‘no contact’. But when you develop a strong divining sense for the child behind that armour, and you make your dealings and negotiations only with that child, you find that everybody becomes, in a way, like your own child. It’s an intangible thing. But they too sense when that is what you are appealing to, and they respond with an impulse of real life, you get a little flash of the essential person, which is the child. Usually, that child is a wretchedly isolated undeveloped little being. It’s been protected by the efficient armour, it’s never participated in life, it’s never been exposed to living and to managing the person’s affairs, it’s never been given responsibility for taking the brunt. And it’s never properly lived. That’s how it is in almost everybody. And that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits. And in its own self, it is still unprotected, incapable, inexperienced. Every single person is vulnerable to unexpected defeat in this inmost emotional self. At every moment, behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person’s childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim. And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It’s their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can’t understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That’s the carrier of all the living qualities. It’s the center of all the possible magic and revelation.

(Ted Hughes [source])

…and:

Lord, the air smells good today, straight from the mysteries
within the inner courts of God.
A grace like new clothes thrown
across the garden, free medicine for everybody.
The trees in their prayer, the birds in praise
the first blue violets kneeling.
Whatever came from Being is caught up in being, drunkenly forgetting the way back.

(Jelaluddin Rumi [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Wait

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

(Galway Kinnell [source])

…and:

In The Night

Out of my window late at night I gape
And see the stars but do not watch them really,
And hear the trains but do not listen clearly;
Inside my mind I turn about to keep
Myself awake, yet am not there entirely.
Something of me is out in the dark landscape.

How much am I then what I think, how much what I feel?
How much the eye that seems to keep stars straight?
Do I control what I can contemplate
Or is it my vision that’s amenable?
I turn in my mind, my mind is a room whose wall
I can see the top of but never completely scale.

All that I love is, like the night, outside,
Good to be gazed at, looking as if it could
With a simple gesture be brought inside my head
Or in my heart. But my thoughts about it divide
Me from my object. Now deep in my bed
I turn and the world turns on the other side.

(Elizabeth Jennings [source])

…and:

The cure for irony isn’t a dose of sincerity. Sincerity can’t be applied like a salve, or plaster, or arranged to countervail mockery. Sincerity doesn’t take measures to appear to be, or to seem. Asked to prove itself, its voice squeaks. Sincerity walks headfirst into wind—and suffers the cold. In rough surf, it erodes. In heat, it stains. Its gauges work. It’s accurate.

To be an apple tree in fall, to fully enter the realm of gold, to be right up against the end, and no longer green—that gesture can’t be conscripted. Sincerity isn’t in service of. A tree doesn’t will itself to turn, to feel the chill crenellate in leaves, and let go. A tree gives over. That phrase “the promise of spring”? Trees really believe it.

(Lia Purpura [source])