Author Topic: As wind knows trees, water the face of rock  (Read 5256 times)

Acappella

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As wind knows trees, water the face of rock
« on: November 21, 2003, 01:10:19 PM »
In addition to the earnest posts on this forum, I find the words and images and feelings in the following quotes helpful as chaperones on my tentative move towards intimacy especially but not limited to self awareness:

Quote
We say "I will" and "I will not" and imagine ourselves our own masters.  The truth is our masters are sleeping.  One wakes within us and we are ridden like beasts though the rider is but some hither to unguessed part of ourselves.  
   
                        Excerpt from book: A General Theory of Love.
The authors of "A General Theory of Love" also speak of therapy as a process where the theapist must find the melodic essence of the person they are working with ...have a good ear, empathy and a sense of rhythm, for the healing to be probable & thorough. Seems to me a wonderful thing for all of us to aspire to in knowing one another and ourselves.  (The book is written by three MDs from UCSF and includes brain physiology research and their intuitive experience with patients.... oh and beautiful prose).  

They also say that who we become depends in part on who we love and that we are hard wired to be dependent and programmable socially and ignoring that is the first step to a lack of independence.  

Quote
He looked into his own soul with a telescope.
What seemed all irregular he saw and showed to be beautiful constellations and he added to the consciousness hidden worlds within worlds.
 Coleridge.

Quote
Knowledge is not what I thought;
Not a cure, but a past time.
All hours fill with names
research into memorable events.
This however doesn't mean all horizons remember to be horizontal
to lie down docile along the mountains
between earth and sky
far away in the future or the past.
Some horizons have teeth
others sprout upwards towards the stars
tilted to some other axis
unearthly, exploded into accident
no longer tangential to our lives.
Or, perhaps knowing is something more
like lying down along the Earth
one skin horizon
between sun and grass
all melting edges
a yearning almost resolved
or like flying upwards with strands of smoke
as wind knows trees
water the face of rock.


I don't know who wrote this last piece. If anyone recognizes it I'd appreciate knowing who wrote it.   I found it in a bunch of scraps of paper I had in a box from twenty years ago.  I must have written it down from some place and sensed something wonderous in it yet I left it buried for decades.  "A yearning almost resolved" that is life itself I'm afraid.  

Intimacy, I am beginning to feel, is emotional intricacy.  And if genius is in the details and wisdom in the bigger picture then perhaps wisdom gives us the ability to step back and emotional intelligence the ability to immerse.  And then perhaps at its best life is a dance between immersion/connection and letting go.  Intimacy and wisdom.  Trying to stay distant and wise or trying to only  be immersed, either is a sort of freezing in mid step or hopping along on only one foot in the race of life.  

As a silent outsider for all of my life and having been near to death many times and isolated on each occasion I am realizing I gained some valuable wisdom - some big picture perspective.  Like looking at Earth from space where boarders disapear and we are all so obviously interconnected.  Meanwhile, I have remained frightened of intimacy, of letting go of the big picture and diving into the tiny specific moment.  I am living a half life; gazing at the big picture, the earth below, marveling at the beauty, trembling at the danger without touching down to connect and immerse fully with either.   I don't fear death (postponing it as long as possible though).  I know how to let go sometimes & connect sometimes but I just don't know yet how to hold on and then let go and then hold on again...those three quotes help me do what I don't know how to.

Argusina

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As wind knows trees, water the face of rock
« Reply #1 on: December 04, 2003, 02:13:33 PM »
What an exquisite post Acapella. THANK YOU.  :cry:  :)

Here comes a little piece (originally a stream of consciousness excercise) which I think is my way of saying some of the things you expressed in such a lovely way...

Grand Mother

Your angelic, aging hands parchment of countless caresses and cantos. The sandy wrinkles of your canyon face, deepened by the rhythmic waves of tears and laughter. The infinite grace of your serpentine veins, red rivers flooding and ebbing on the shore of you.  Your belly, concave and stretched, birth now grown up and pumping veins all their own. Or in the earth, silently singing to the bulbs and bugs. The exquisite emptiness of your valleyed breasts, sweetly sucked out by the force of growing and eternal toothless green love. The measureless dignity of your bending toes, with a million miles in memory.  How compassionate the callused palms, intricate and earthy maps of your unfolding universe. How tender the curve of your back, bending as a marguerite maturely bows to earth, returning to the source that bore her. Delicate and endlessly beautiful in blossom, petals lost to the embracing wind. Wisdom sprung from seasons rolling over the fields time and time again. Wisdom gathered in the closing trumpet of your ear, gathered from the sacred cadences of capillaries, gathered by your open hands. Wisdom that enfolds and encompasses your carmine core with the same purpose that makes a bumble bee fly, in spite of its form. Soon the cocoon of yellowed decades shed, soon your transparent skin temple empty, echoing of life elsewhere. Elsewhere, elating and lifting your breathless being into the breaching sky, merging with the larger soul you always knew belonged to you. Seeing, without cataract, the countless seed capsules of love that burst and stretch through the universe, unhindered and free.

guest-acappella

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As wind knows trees, water the face of rock
« Reply #2 on: December 09, 2003, 06:08:41 PM »
Argusina - wow, reading what you wrote I feel a sense of beauty and connectedness deeper & broader, rougher and yet also more eloquently graceful than any traditional omages of respect paid for aging and the elderly - the process of individual living which includes a steady pace toward a our own end and toward being absorbed into life in general.

Argusina

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As wind knows trees, water the face of rock
« Reply #3 on: December 17, 2003, 07:46:48 AM »
Thank you Acappella for your very insightful and compassionate remarks on my piece!

I am still in awe of your post  :D

Here comes a poem from ee cummings, a poet who has provided much healing for me. He is CERTAINLY not narcissistic - but so full of love and empathy! I would not mind a man like that  :wink:

e. e. cummings - i thank you God for most this amazing

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
wich is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Acappella

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As wind knows trees, water the face of rock
« Reply #4 on: December 25, 2003, 10:59:54 PM »
Sense-ational!

THANK YOU.