Sunday, January 17, 2021

The honest beating of my heart

 January 18, 2021

 

I feel, for a while now, that I am in the midst of a profound and heavy emptiness. The only time I remember feeling this deep a hole was in the year 1997. It was at this time that the fourth friend that I wrote about in the previous post — the one whose friendship I botched —introduced me to Rilke. He was an answer to a question I didn’t know I was even asking. A path to a search that I hadn’t named at that point. Slowly he walked with me through the next several years — which were slow and fast, and full of stops and starts as well as long easy sprints — deepening my life and work. 

 

So naturally today when again, I find myself feeling that long, that lost, that difficult emptiness I turn to his words again. I pull out his ‘Letters on Life’ and begin reading the section On Work.

 

As it always happens, I get completely pulled into the words. I read, I stop, I walk, I read some more. At the end of the section, I go back and read some passages that felt particularly relevant – I see that the ones that catch my attention are about my ‘true work’, the life tasks I recognize deeply as mine. I want to, so badly, be someone, ‘who resides in his own stillness or simply in the midst of his melody, close to the honest beating of his heart.’

 

It is painful to recognize how lost from this I am today. How I don’t feel I know my life tasks, and stillness and being close to the honest beating of my heart feel so far away. But being reminded that this is what is missing is also exhilarating and an internal bell has begun ringing and its reverberations flow through my blood and muscles. I know that all that matters right now, what really matters, is to find those honest beatings of my heart.


I feel like I have forgotten how to do it. I can start by making a list of the things I feel are my tasks and mine alone. I can take one of those things on that list and write more about it. I can let it be in the background as I go about my daily tasks. I can discover the songs it wants to unfold within me. 

 

I can go back to 1997 and think of the things that might have worked. Slow, quiet days staying with the heaviness that felt like it would kill. Conversations with others seeking beyond the material and the known. Reading the words of those gone before and long, long walks to assimilate those words. 

 

I am not the same person I was in 1997. Somewhat wiser, somewhat more jaded; somewhat busier, much busier; somewhat more scared, somewhat more sure that ultimately I will know something, like I had once, or perhaps even twice, before in my life. I feel like parts of me have been chipped away by life, leaving holes in me. I feel like I donned many armours over the years but in 2020 dropped them, and so feel at once light and very vulnerable. 

 

And because the not knowing of ‘how’ makes me feel too fuzzy. I need to list things I can do…   Like stay with the heaviness and rejoice when it lifts for a bit... Like voice my doubts and desires, the places I feel torn, and the things I miss… Like say what I feel even when it doesn’t want to be heard and show my fragile places… Like name the tensions I feel around me and inquire about them… And I also know these are the things I know how to do, and I look and long for the things I don’t yet know too. 



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