just say that phrase to yourself once or twice. now imagine it with a Romanian accent.
i'm totally biting Andrei Codrescu (NPR poet) which is a novelty in itself since i think his poetry is heavy-handed and his prose a bit too Creative Writing MFA for me. anyone who's ever endured a grad-level writing workshop will know exactly what i'm talking about.
and as i just wrote that, i realize i've implied that i drive a hybrid and proclaimed my creative writing 'education'. ouch. i sound like more of a hipster dbag than i intended but the point is this:
what have you heard/seen/smelled/touched/held today that struck you? i mean just struck you with that sort of eternal truth or beauty, you know, the kind that hints at the otherworldly. anything that put your wires down into the ether for sec?
is it too much to ask to have that on a daily basis? am i an ingrate for always expecting it?
no, no. it's not expecting. it's
longing for. (btw, don't italics just SCREAM longing? ever noticed that?)
a taste of the eternal. maybe it's a remnant of the eastern European bloodlines i have, but damn, if those moments are the ones that keep my faith in a heaven and an existence that's better, broader, fuller beyond our earthly constraints.
I suppose it's in my blood to see everything as work. I had a boyfriend who used to tell me that I was descended from polish rutabaga farmers or something equally absurd and that is the reason for my approach to life as toil. And the reason for my pointy chin. (yeah, i was in that relationship on and off for about 5 years too long. talk about toil.)
Fine, so say I, toil I will take. If for no other reason than the starkness of my workaday world contrasting so richly with the transcendent moments.
Similar thing for my faith. If I make it to heaven, do you understand the vivid, just freaking VIVD, sense of joy a narcissist like me would feel in having been proved right?? I'm sure even if I don't make it to heaven, but I go to purgatory or hell -- I'll have the same level of joy in the validation of a life of spiritual toil was not for nothing. (That statement certainly underestimates the benefits of spiritual toil on our daily lives too, so don't get me wrong, I appreciate faith as a reward in and of itself.)
At any rate, folks, it's the same old song, sadness makes the happier times happier. and it's true. i swear this is why as we get older, life starts moving faster and faster. it's because our experiential knowledge base just gets broader and broader and the contrast of the shit with the glorious just becomes more and more vivid. and those glorious times just pass by faster and faster, because we KNOW WE'RE IN IT. like meta-living but so innate to the human existence as to be undetectable.
(that last bit was a little love note to my darling Bebe who turns over the 1 year leaf this week. we did it, my dear.)
