These blog entries are just attempts to point at the elusive. I do not fancy that they contain “the answer, the method, the solution” or even “the way”. The map is not the actual land geography itself. A word is not the thing itself. We are spiritual beings having a human experience; even this leads us somewhere but is not the destination. This “Life thing” is too fluid for that. It’s too ever-shifting. It’s too elusive and potent. (It is simply “human” to want to figure it all out.) It’s too all-enmeshing. It’s very slippery. The more I want to grab it – to feel, hold, describe, possess, and then to package so carefully with words in a way that reduces it to ‘accuracy’, fixedness, one-dimensionality – the more it loses something. Living with the Mystery is not something we really tend to cherish in most moments. A job interview, religion, problem-solving seem to ask of us not “success”, “orthodoxy” or “answers” but rather a full engagement with process in the moment.
I attempt to offer small windows that look into the dark
and ordinary corners of experience. We each have pieces that add to the
collective Story of this thing we call “Life”, “Living”, “Being Alive”, “Being
Human” and even – or especially – “Being Spiritual”.
It bothered me as a child to look at the paintings on the walls for too long, and over years. The stern soldier’s face never changed. His expression remained tense, volatile, angry. The light in his dark room never turned on behind him. He didn’t blink or twitch. The ocean waves in another painting remained frozen in mid-roll. The sun never set in that painting either. I long for a fuller picture – for the soldier to soften into his pain rather than turning stone cold solid fixed year after year on the wall. I want him to mimic the fluidity of Life.
There was an old Victorian style house I loved as a
teenager. It was in a nearby neighborhood. Surrounded by a growing commercial
district, it stood on several acres of farm-turned-grassland. It was not
typical of the houses in Southern California where I grew up; it hearkened back
more to my childhood summers on the east coast with relatives. I dreamed of
roaming that old house, once somebody’s home, which now stood so starkly out of
place in that environment. I longed to climb the stairway, probe dusty closets,
light a candle that would cast its glow on the past and whisper stories of the
people, animals, plants that had animated the place. I want the walls of the
Victorian mansion to respire with life, to wake up the cobwebs for an
accounting of an unspoken history. I want the house to mimic the fluidity of
Life.
I want to remember that this is all so transient and “un-solid”. I long for the words that offer hope, potential pathways for exploration, to remind myself how tenuous this all is. And, as such, it is precious and to be lived bit by bit, experience by experience.
I want all the dirty incongruencies and questions to dance
around in colorful yells of glee: “Look at me! I don’t fit! I am living proof
that Life is Untidy, Inexplicable, Beautiful!” I want the raucous pirates of my
Soul to shout out their plundering ways, even as the demure young angels sing
their loving chorus.
This is the exploration:
to hold it all lightly (illuminated and
gentle). To observe. To release the compulsion to explain it all into
meaningless dust. To embrace Now,
speaking the truth of any moment’s experience. With the utter assurance that
it, too, shall pass...this is the Nature of the ebb and flow of the pieces of
our Collective Story.
All blog photographs taken by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.
