archival. i’m enjoying this floating along the river. odd turns now and then, but interesting as well.
On Sun, January 14, 2007 2:36 am, ****** wrote:
> no how much I get in life from
> knowledge I will always have to fall to find out what hurts……..I
> know make no sense.
Actually, it makes quite a lot of sense. What lessons do we really learn
but that we have to bleed for them? Hell, most times, I have to be all but
dead before I’ll learn. Stupid stubbornness.
> The big question is How do someone with true gifts never use them.
In my experience, true gifts aren’t the ones we list and think about…
and we use them quite naturally. But I have a sense of what you mean in
this. I forever feel as if I’m not ‘doing enough’ in the world… even as
most times, I’m wearing myself out.
A constant feeling of needing to push, needing to strive, needing to seek,
and needing to not be still. Not as in unable, but as in something truly,
deeply, massively, imperative sitting just…. over…. the horizon.
It is an oddness I’ve felt all my life. And I’m no closer to knowing what
it is or what it means than I ever was… or so it seems. My own vanishing
point.
I think we each have one. Vanishing points, that is… the moment when we,
like caterpillars, shed what we thought this life was and become
butterfly. And then, truly, fly.
Maybe we only find it at what we know as the end. And perhaps that’s why
this sense of happy/sad exists.
Saudade. That’s a word someone who once was here taught me. It’s
Portuguese. As I understand it, they are almost genetically prediposed to
it. Or something. They say it has no English translation.
I found that somewhat odd at first, but in looking at it, I can see why.
We’re a very black and white culture, in many ways. Pun, entendre, and
indictment.
Anyway, it’s pronounced ‘saw-dodge’ with just the lightest lifting furling
of the ‘g’ so it sounds like ‘saw-dah-j’ with the same soft ‘j’ that most
French has, or you could also find the sound in the beginning of the word
‘just’ if you say it softly… no emphasis on the ‘j’, just there.
Which seems kind of pertinent.
The word itself translates to that aching sense of missing in everything
you find, or that aching sense of fullness when there’s nothing to be
found. The friend I once had described it as ‘the delicate beauty of a
transient thing.’
My own, personal definition has turned out to be more along the lines of,
‘the feeling that no matter how much bliss you experience, there is always
that part you never will’… but that sounds depressing and I don’t mean
it so. It’s like the feeling of rain. Impermanence displayed, and the
tugging ache of how all is so perfect but none of it lasts.
We’re cultured, indoctrinated to find that heavy, sad. But it isn’t. Not
really. It just is.
But to get back to your words… I have a crooked smile for hearing you
draw. I’ve always wanted to be able to do so, and have simply never had
the ability. When I do draw, I stick to those means and methods that do
not require precision… where the outcome relies on the sense of a thing
rather than fidelity.
I suppose it’s my way of trying and admitting at the same time.
I am sorry for how that delight was shattered for you. I wish you did draw
or enjoy it. When I read that, I wanted to ask you to draw something for
me. A very specific something. But I feel as if I could not ask it if it
would mean reminding you of that trashcan of youthful dreams.
> Even now i have no desire to draw….my imagination is
> still limitless….That probably what reminds me in my
> dreams…..about the wings I gave away to walk a walk of repeat and
> rerun….
All I can think of to say here is, ‘If you still remember them, and how it
felt to fly, they aren’t really gone.’ And maybe, all you need is
something larger than the memory of being hurt or being powerless in the
face of a greater certainty to find it again… but you can safely ignore
me, that’s just my stubbornness talking. (wry grin)
> You said “Progress”….What does that mean to you I am curious
> I would like for you to tell me more about these firefiles…..only if
> there is more to tell…
Well, I suppose progress is like a breadcrumb trail. I’m so Gretel. Hah.
Demanding the trail be left and too ignorant to think about the reality
that is hungry animals in the forest.
Progress, some means by which to measure growth. But when you ask me, I
instead think about how all such measures are insufficient. How, when it
comes right down to it, the only way we know progress at all is to have a
moment of choosing differently and realizing we’ve done so. And even then,
it isn’t really progress until we no longer see it that way, is it?
As for the fireflies, there are too many meanings to effectively convey.
Connection. Loss. Hope. Remembrance. Saudade. I’m still absorbing a recent
insight and also a recent lesson. I suppose fireflies was my way of saying
hello and goodbye and hello again, and realizing they’re all the same.
> Also i would like to know what is it like to watch my foot prints walk
> across you blog and profile in log reports…..curious on that……..
> (grin)
Oh, that’s boring stuff, really. Numbers. Lists of numbers and what each
one found interesting here. Though it is interesting to see how some
numbers find so much of interest, and others find nothing so. And it is
curious how some numbers that I would have thought would never arrive here
do, but when they do, they never find the things I’d show them… and they
leave before they do, almost as if afraid they might.
I suppose that’s cryptic to anyone but me. Or them. Doesn’t matter.
> One last thing……What is the First letter and the Last Letter in
> your name stranger…….Don’t want your whole name Just the two
> letters I ask for….
I appreciate the curiosity. And since it turns out a rather interesting
result, I’ll give them to you… Be. (grin)