I sat in the armchair at the back of the room, swallowed in the dark while the light from the living room poured down the hall and faded just out of reach. I saw myself in the space, charged by its structure, its light, its dynamism. I felt called to notice it, revel in it, make it my art.
Not to write songs, make films, or paint pictures am I called. But to notice the beauty, the darkness and the art of consciousness filling a space. To make possible the locating of life within a fragment of time and space. And to live. Living as just that; sudden awareness of the self within the world, no matter how immediate, no matter how expansive.
To meditate as a state of being. We cannot separate where we are from the moment we exist there. Time is a dimension of physical space. The sun cannot be said to be setting unless you find yourself just at the place where it disappears from your horizon. So it is with every phase or era of our lives. The years, the moments inseparable from the landscape, the people, the air that consumes us.
She died in April and the last time I saw her, we sat under a tree, sipping coffee and nibbling on cake. Every corner of this place is still filled with her. She is as much gone as she ever was here. She was always a figment of my imagination.
People die but they never go away. They are forever present in the very places we knew them. We can always hold in our hearts the particular gifts of another because they fill the space inside of us as much as they ever filled the space outside. As long as I am alive, so is everyone I have ever known.
Everything is the way my eye sees it. All I need to have love is myself with just the right orientation to the world. How can we love someone who is gone so purely, so easily, so simply, but have such problems loving those around us who are still living? We ask nothing of the dead, or so I hope. Can we love the living with as much abandon and surrender as we would afford them if they were, suddenly, no longer living?