|
|
"Time goes from present to past." - Dogen Zenji |
|
|
|
|
written: 10 jan 99. sunday night. 101° fever.
spinning: "No Holly For Miss Quinn", "Book of Days" by Enya
i am tired. i am tired of how we hide from each other -- behind our computer screens, our email, our chatrooms. we have grown so content with how we willfully, intentionally disconnect ourselves from each other. there are so many people, all around us, everywhere we look -- and yet we cover our hearts and our spirits, we tuck them away from view, from the sunlight, from the warmth and comfort of the others walking amongst us. each one silently yearning, wishing to reach out, not knowing how. we return instead to the cold, numb glow of our monitors, as some kind of twisted, merciless surrogate. we somehow think we're connecting with that disembodied entity from faraway, as we see those words scroll across the screen. but we each live different worlds in our heads. we hear different voices in the other's words, different emotions in the other's meanings. there is no connection. just two isolated, differing perceptions of connection. two polarized illusions.
where are those kindred spirits who still believe in connection? in the joining of hearts and minds? in the warmth of a laugh, in the vulnerability of a tear shed. in the comfort of a touch, of a hand held. in the conduit opened from a long gaze between eyes, in the release from a fierce embrace.
how can we willfully push these things away?
I keep discovering things from my past, favorite stories, that struck me and touched me at a young age without really understanding why ... that now, as I dig them out again, make sense as to why I related to them. Certain characters that I could then only feel a kinship with, but didn't know myself well enough to understand beyond the feeling.Certain people are the same way. Artists for whom I feel a kinship and a strange familiarity with, through the work they choose or the deeds they do in real life. And as I learn more about them, I find that we lead such very similar lives.
Occasionally I will meet someone, and we will feel an instant familiarity and connection with each other. It's such a joyful comfort -- from precisely all those things unspoken that can only happen face-to-face -- of feeling like you have found a long-lost sibling or a natural partner & complement. That you know from feeling in that initial meeting, that there is a bond there, one that happens as effortlessly as breathing.