[Image: “Focus Tracking,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]
From whiskey river’s commonplace book:
What do people want? What are any of us actually, fundamentally, looking for in all the various things we are looking for? We all are, and yet we remain unconvinced that we are, or that we are enough. Regardless of how much we augment our being with our immense doing, in an effort to construct an abiding and secure identity, we remain unsure. Even the greatest of us know, in the middle of the night, when the moment is most tender, that we are all like clouds, like grass, springing up and dying back when winter comes. Somehow, despite all the various accomplishments, both inner and outer, of a lifetime, none of us can escape the fact that we are less and less day by day, as time runs on. Whether or not we think about this we all know it. The most basic fact of our lives — our very existence, our very sense of identity — is elusive, constantly sliding away.
It was the genius of the Buddha to pinpoint this abiding human problem and to apply gentle acupressure right at the heart of it. The Buddha felt that since what we hold to as identity, our fixed sense of being a person, is so unreliable (as we always knew, always feared), we should stop insisting on it with such shrillness. Rather than trying to avoid the reality of not being someone, Buddha thought that we should observe and embrace this fact. There is no real identity outside of flux, he taught. If we practice and train in this existential fact, which we verify with meditation experience, then we have nothing to fear. As we begin to warm up to life in this way, with openness to the endless change within and outside us, we come to see the effort to maintain a brittle sense of identity as cold, even frozen. We come to appreciate that the whole point of spiritual practice is to warm up, to become flexible with what we think we are and begin to release ourselves to our experience as it really is. This warmth melts the ice of identity and lets the waters of our lifetime flow.
(Zogetsu Norman Fischer [source: absolutely none that I’ve found… possibly a transcription from a video or other non-text source, but that’s unconfirmed])
…and (except for the fourth stanza):
And now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.For once on the face of the earth.
Let’s not speak in any language,
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines,
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victory with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their
brothers in the shade, doing nothing.What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
(Life is what it is about,
I want no truck with death.)If we were not so singleminded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.Now I’ll count up to twelve,
and you keep quiet and I will go.
(Pablo Neruda [source])
…and:
If there were just one gift I could give to you,
I would stand as a mirror to your life,
and you would see the way you’ve grown,
see the way you shine,
and see all the love that’s in your eyes.
(Ellen Stapenhorst,via Thomas F. Crum [source])
From elsewhere:
All around me people are going to work. They are opening shops and heading for metro stations. They move in formations, they take directions, they are pulled along, but I don’t feel that same pull, it is a cord I lack, this is something I am not a part of. I cannot catch hold. Either that or it is something that washes them along the streets, a current that carries them along, but this current cannot reach me. Or perhaps it is some inner mechanism. Something that steers their feet through the streets, an inner drive which I don’t possess, a spring that cannot be tightened, a mechanism that is missing. I don’t know whether they are being pulled, carried along by the current or whether inner mechanisms are propelling them along the streets, but I know that, whatever it is, it doesn’t work on me.
(Solvej Balle [source])
…and:
Everyone is vulnerable. For some people, for Steve, it comes out as fear, avoiding situations where the vulnerability is exposed. For others, for an awful lot of people these days, vulnerability comes out as anger, pushing away anything that feels like it might pierce their shell. Steve watches people on TV sometimes, shouting the odds about this, that, or the other, railing against the truth of reality, and he always sees the pain first. They have lost someone, or they never had someone, and so now they have lost themselves.
(Richard Osman [source — the full text of the book is not online, including at that link, but you can find this excerpt on Goodreads, here])
…and:
Sitting Outside
These lawn chairs and the chaise lounge
of bulky redwood were purchased for my father
twenty years ago, then plumped down in the yard
where he seldom went when he could still work
and never had stayed long. His left arm
in a sling, then lopped off, he smoked there or slept
while the weather lasted, watched what cars passed,
read stock reports, counted pills,
then dozed again. I didn’t go there
in those last weeks, sick of the delusions
they still maintained, their talk of plans
for some boat tour or a trip to the Bahamas
once he’d recovered. Under our willows,
this old set’s done well: we’ve sat with company,
read or taken notes—although the arm rests
get dry and splintery or wheels drop off
so the whole frame’s weakened if it’s hauled
across rough ground. Of course the trees,
too, may not last: leaves storm down,
branches crack off, the riddled bark
separates, then gets shed. I have a son, myself,
with things to be looked after. I sometimes think
since I’ve retired, sitting in the shade here
and feeling the winds shift, I must have been filled
with a child dread you could catch somebody’s dying
if you got too close. And you can’t be too sure.
(W.D. Snodgrass [source])
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