| 24 jul 99. mt. tam, marin. | |
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Sitting on a hill, looking out over Beauty ...
... a dense, deep, wide panoramic valley of trees, a brilliant blanket of sunlight & green, spread out
for miles and miles and miles.
off in the distance, nearly out of view, the hint of an ocean beyond.
a falcon flies through the chasm silently, giving vivid perspective to the vast expanse i peer out into.
it's laid out in front of me, i look at it with my own eyes, taking in everything at
once, and i can barely believe what i'm seeing. it's beyond words. it's beautiful.
this is so unreal, I think.
No.
This is Real. This is the Earth, stretched out before you. This is not so
beautiful that it has to be Unreal. Something does not have to be unreal in order
to be blindingly beautiful.
The Beauty you once experienced was Real.
The beauty you are experiencing now is Real. Do not think of it as Unreal to
protect yourself from fully connecting with it.
Neither of these were/are illusions.
You can open yourself up to experiencing Beauty again, as naturally as you open
yourself up here, in this place, to experiencing this laid out before you. Return to
this place to remind you.
My fear is that once I leave here, it will cease to be real -- it will just be an
image, a memory, a memory which can be scrambled, blurred, lost, forgotten,
imagined.
how do i keep this Real, once i've left?
| 26 jul 99. 11:17 pm. | |
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faintly heard: |
fatboy slim, praise you. |
those last words echo in me with icy clarity. because when i left new mexico, i wasn't able to keep that other Beautiful memory Real ... what was Beautiful became overrun with pain, with dark intent, with malice, cruelty, premeditation, betrayal. i had shut out what felt Beautiful and let it become consumed it with what felt Horrible. i had convinced myself that what felt so Beautiful never was there to begin with, that it was all in my mind.
and i was on my way to literally erasing all memory of her. of convincing myself that it all never existed, that it was all a cruel and vicious hoax that happened to me, that i had fabricated it all in my head.
love.
but in doing so, in nearly convincing myself that the love was not Real, was never Real, i was on the road to permanently distorting how i relate to the world. people losing substance, turning to hollow glass casings. my memory being something i could not trust. faith leaving me. something dangerously dark taking its place.
my therapist helped me to halt that process, and begin me on the road back. it began with taking myself back to that nearly-erased memory, and re-experiencing it ... letting myself relive what was Beautiful, something so heavenly and private and intimate that there is probably no way for anyone else to share in it and understand it.
the memory and the grief has been re-opened.
now,
a year and a half after what happened, i find that i am
i am ashamed that i miss her. that i still love her.
i take a big risk in talking about it openly, about something so deeply personal -- i have no idea how to go about this or where it will lead. just as with what happened to me, i have no idea going in what will come out the other side.
but i find that after months of inexplicable nightmares, sudden intruding memories and reminders, after a year of scribbling aimlessly & feverishly in my private journal, searching in vain for answers and explanations ... i realize that it's my website that has been my conduit for true exploration and release, that it is this creation that has become, in a way, my therapy.
i know in my heart -- i can feel it -- that this is the place, the battleground, the canvas, the safe room, where i can at least feel like i'm talking to someone about it, even though i'm really just talking to myself, to darkness.
but with that perception at least, my 'voice' i know will be
(i think shakespeare was right -- "all the world's a
Time goes from present to past. - Dogen Zenji
