The Life of Experiences
Jan. 14th, 2011 11:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cedar_groveFrom The Book of Awakening:Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have.
"…while the impermanence of life, if fixed on, can be terrifying, leaving us preoccupied with death, the very same impermanence, if allowed its infinite frame, can soothe us with the understanding that even the deepest pain will pass."
I don't speak about it often, I have tried not to even think about it very often either, and perhaps that is wrong, but there was a time when I held a little life in the palm of my hand… and mourned its passing. I've no way of knowing if what I thought I saw was real or imagined, or some combination of the two, except for the memory of the feeling in my body, and the memory that remains in my heart.
At the time this happened, it was not a disappointment to me at all. I did not know it was happening, and I was young. It was only in hindsight, in retrospect that I had sat and said – yes, that was my child, and now she is gone… except not gone. She dwells with me in spirit and always will – and that is both a comfort and a sorrow.
The disappointment came much later… the disappointment came when I knew… when I tried to be a part of the creation of life, and when the assay failed, and none around me seemed to understand or even try to understand my pain in that, let alone to share in the disappointment and sadness. Perhaps that was what was most raw of all, because what I had expected, what I had wanted was for the depth of that ache to be shared.
Was it wrong to wish that upon others? Perhaps, but in knowing that it was not shared, that my wants and desires, the meaning of what it was we tried to do, that transcended just the act itself – knowing that then, and more than that, knowing it now the pain of that disappointment passes into the acceptance of understanding… that had they, any one of them, come to be, in more than just spirit – where they are cherished – my life would not be enriched by the happiness that is mine now even through the new struggles I face, or by the hope I hold for the future, nor comforted in the knowledge that now I have the understanding and the sharing I craved then, in the one I love.
And for them… and their lives, though they would have been loved, would not be all that it should.
Perhaps some things – though we know them not at the time – are for the best, and in those wants denied to us, we come to see the Old Ones even better that we could ever know.
Even if one glimpses God,
there are still cuts and splinters
and burns along the way.
"…while the impermanence of life, if fixed on, can be terrifying, leaving us preoccupied with death, the very same impermanence, if allowed its infinite frame, can soothe us with the understanding that even the deepest pain will pass."
I don't speak about it often, I have tried not to even think about it very often either, and perhaps that is wrong, but there was a time when I held a little life in the palm of my hand… and mourned its passing. I've no way of knowing if what I thought I saw was real or imagined, or some combination of the two, except for the memory of the feeling in my body, and the memory that remains in my heart.
At the time this happened, it was not a disappointment to me at all. I did not know it was happening, and I was young. It was only in hindsight, in retrospect that I had sat and said – yes, that was my child, and now she is gone… except not gone. She dwells with me in spirit and always will – and that is both a comfort and a sorrow.
The disappointment came much later… the disappointment came when I knew… when I tried to be a part of the creation of life, and when the assay failed, and none around me seemed to understand or even try to understand my pain in that, let alone to share in the disappointment and sadness. Perhaps that was what was most raw of all, because what I had expected, what I had wanted was for the depth of that ache to be shared.
Was it wrong to wish that upon others? Perhaps, but in knowing that it was not shared, that my wants and desires, the meaning of what it was we tried to do, that transcended just the act itself – knowing that then, and more than that, knowing it now the pain of that disappointment passes into the acceptance of understanding… that had they, any one of them, come to be, in more than just spirit – where they are cherished – my life would not be enriched by the happiness that is mine now even through the new struggles I face, or by the hope I hold for the future, nor comforted in the knowledge that now I have the understanding and the sharing I craved then, in the one I love.
And for them… and their lives, though they would have been loved, would not be all that it should.
Perhaps some things – though we know them not at the time – are for the best, and in those wants denied to us, we come to see the Old Ones even better that we could ever know.
