Just as the universe of space-time is made up of mostly nothing, vacuum scattered with brief luminous intensities, so being human is made up of mostly distance, unbridgable, which we must somehow forgive.
We can never be quite whole, but we can be quite holy.
8 comments:
This is profound. I really like the idea of:
We can never be quite whole, but we can be quite holy.
Now that I'm 40, I'm coming to accept my not quite wholeness, and even discovering the holiness of it.
Was is it about 40? I feel so much more comfortable in my skin than when I was in my 30's (we won't even talk about the train wreck of my 20's....) Is it just me?
Anne, have you seen What The Bleep Do We Know?!, Donnie Darko (versions 1 and/or 2), or Waking Life? Maybe check them out . . .
Anne, you keep speaking to me.
Patty: Yep, exactly. A lot changed for me when I hit 40, and I'm not sure quite why (though I finished my master's shortly before turning 40, which freed me to come back to writing ... eh, ok, scratch that "not sure quite why"!). I like myself a lot better now than I did in most of my 20s or certainly my difficult 30s. It's not even just being comfortable in my own skin, it's being comfortable in my own soul, if that makes sense....
Erin, I actually haven't seen any of those. I'm horrible at getting around to seeing movies! What The Bleep... has been recommended to me a lot. I'll have to add those to my "must see" list -- thanks!
Emily, I dunno, I'm just talking to myself here. :) OK, I lie, if I were just talking to myself I would have posted the full six-page ramble from my paper journal that boiled down to this small post. I may yet post more from the same place -- it started out, oddly enough, with a brief meditation on the differences between Mark Doty's poetry & that of D.A. Powell -- one concerned with finding beauty & healing the broken places, and one concerned with loving the brokenness as is (which is of course absurdly simplified as regards both poets, but it was a starting place). One seeking closure & one resisting closure. Anyhow -- being the good Gemini that I am, I can't help but embrace both ways of seeing. And that somehow ended up with "the unbridgable distance" and "holiness" or whatever. Poetry is so weird.
"Whole vs. Holy"
"one concerned with finding beauty & healing the broken places, and one concerned with loving the brokenness as is"
Anne: I love this, you are defintely onto something here.
Peter, thanks -- I think what I'm on to is "girl, you should hurry up and go to school already so you can write papers on this crap." Hehehe. There's definitely something, though, in the comparison of those two poets that is teaching me something about my own (for lack of a better term) poetics. I'm just chewing and chewing on it and someday I'll figure it out.
Anne: You're doing more without being in a program than many people who are in one do the entire time they're there.
Trista - just think how hard I'd be working if I had someone tapping their fingers and saying "so, where's that paper you owe me then? And what about those revisions?" *grin*
Post a Comment