What does it mean
when a meaning-making monkey
says the universe is meaningless
and another meaning-making monkey
writes about what the first monkey
is saying?
It means there are
two monkeys dancing
and neither one of us
knows the steps.
(Image from Sun Xun's 3D animated film of scanned, inked woodblocks, Time Spy.)
Our world is turned on its head. We are reinventing ourselves. We are reinventing our Selves.
We are closing–after less than a year and a half–the doors of our beloved café. It is for good. We want to believe it is for the best. For us all. This was a dream whose time was not now. The cost was too high. We have no more to give.
We are closing–after over ten years–our catering business. This has been our world. This has been our life. We are tired. We are getting old before our time.
We are moving, as well, our home. We are down-sizing. By a ratio of seven to one.
Our world is turned on its head.
We are frightened but we are also excited about new beginnings. More time together. More time to pursue what really matters to us, what we truly value in our selves as persons. Our art. Our words. Our music.
We are ready for a new life. We are ready for new lives.
So….
No music this week. Words instead.
This story has been much on my mind.
We all live in a cloud of unknowing.
At times, this becomes much more apparent.
(Many thanks to juntamng for sharing this story.)
(NaPoWriMo, Day 6) There is but the barest little bit of nothing separates nowhere from now here, the barest little space.
there was a gash in the night a slash in the pause and pull and space of the world an empty place in the words the sturdy frame weakened age, cruelty, time and knowledge like the passing of Basho's gas
"...a thing, any thing, impinges on us by a more important fact, its self-existence, without reference to any other thing, in short, the very character of it which calls our attention to it, which wants us to know more about it, its particularity." --Charles Olson If we could hold any thing in hand or mind, any singular, self-existent thing without reference to any other thing, then that thing would and could only be the only thing. We would find our selves holding this whole universe, this allofexistenceatonce, for what else could we hold without reference to any other thing? We would find ourselves held in the hands of angels and annihilated.
You can not save your life. It is not yours to save. No one can save your life. It is not theirs either. It is not yours to own. It is not your own. It is not to be owned. This is the beginning of bondage and the illusion of how to be possessed. It was never yours to own. It is already all loss to you the moment you think it a thing. A life-saving procedure is only a small procedure for delaying the moot loss of a thing you never owned, that was never a thing, saving it just to later lose what you never had to start with. You can't save life any more than you can save time. There is no bank in which to make this deposit. You cannot bank on it at all though you can, it seems, bet on it, bet with it, bet it on something, gamble it and waste it in so many ways that you can lose track of the ways in which you’ve lost it. But wether it is or isn’t here or not there, it is all you have to go on.
A Prayer Like Gravity 