Starting Well
A knife can both give death and give life. It depends on the way you cut with it.
“Sometimes, the prison bars did not work”. - Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works Of Billy The Kid.
Almost all of us will have to deal with loss in our lives. It’s just part of the deal, part of the fixed package and itinerary of this tour we’ve booked, here and now and then.
Loss is a rupture. A kind of heart stroke where your sense, your way of being and language of self are altered. You then have to learn to live again. You ride that horse again, you walk that mountain again. It’s step after step that gets back your senses.
Despite what the pundits and the self-help crooks and creeps say - there is no one way, special way, to do this. It is just effort and trying. Step after step. Day after day. It’s like I remember a person saying, years ago - if you want to be happy, pretend to be happy. Pretty soon, you’ll be happy, just from making that effort, the pretense.
I’m busy writing my book about my own mountain. I hope to share it soon.
Last comment - on this topic, a post by Jonathan Harris speaks to it. He’s a brilliant artist, authentic to the core and he writes about the recent death of his mother.
Starting Well
Grouchy Jim
upstairs apartment
37 years,
always made his wife breakfast.
37 YEARS!
Then a kiss on her cheek
and off to the pit at D & W Oil & Lube.
Now that June is gone
he wakes up late
spits and coughs
then staggers straight to McDonald’s.
Sometimes he sees Anne there
and he buys her a hash brown.
He's learning how to live again.
Know that when you learn to lose yourself and lose others, you will reach the Beloved. There is no other secret to be learned, and more than this is not known to me.
- Ansari of Herat
Sky And Mountain
Sunrise.
Hungry vultures circle above.
Cool winds.
The mountain still.
There.
The way up
is to follow
the way down.