Tuesday, June 11, 2013

I am sitting inside this afternoon, on the computer, hiding from the beauty outside.  Sadness has been a blanket around my shoulders these last two days.  When I tease sadness apart I find alone-ness.  I'm not really lonely, but I am profoundly aware of my alone-ness.  Before David I had gotten to be pretty good friends with alone, I kind of liked it.  In fact, some of the harder work I did in the beginning was to learn to be with another. And now I am missing sharing what I see on my daily walk, hearing and sharing the details of a day well spent, bouncing new thoughts and ideas off another's perspective.  And I realized today that it's been almost four months since I have been touched, really touched. 

Touch is so basic to who I am as a person and it was David's only request.  "If I ever get to the point where I cannot tell you what I want, just remember to touch me.  That's all I want."  I spent all the time I could touching him in those last days. I climbed into that stupid hospital bed with it's high bars and curled myself around him.  I was holding on to him when he died, smoothing his hair back from his forehead.  I don't know if he knew or not, but I was honoring his dearest wish. 

We were well matched, we both spoke through touch.  We never drew away from each other in anger or fear.  In fact, when I was unhappy or frustrated with him I made it a point to touch, to reach out.  It's hard for me to stay unhappy with someone when I touch them.  Connection, energy flows, I remember that we are the same. 

Two Rilke writings came up in my newsfeed today.  My mantras for this day:

Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XII
Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.
What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.
Pour yourself out like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.
Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming
a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~
 
We Move in Infinite Space
by Rainer Maria Rilke
It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses
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.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, "Letters to a Young Poet" 

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