excerpt from something I never wrote.

 we’re all just tired, wanting sleep, but waiting for the lullaby.

Excerpts from Amos Oz’s The Same Sea

agbritt:

A Shadow

Vague rumors abound, and half-testimonies too, concerning a gigantic,
almost human creature, that roams alone in the Tibetan mountains.
Single and free. Footprints have been photographed in the snow
once or twice in inaccessible places where even the most intrepid
mountainer would hardly dare venture. Almost certainly
it is nothing but a local legend. Like the Loch Ness monster
or the ancient Cyclops. His mother, who sat embroidering
almost to the hour of her death, his sad, withdrawn father
who sits night after night at his computer looking for loopholes
in the tax laws, everyone in fact, is condemned to wait
for their own death locked in a seperate cage. You too, with your travelling,
your obsession to go further and further away and hoard more
and more experiences, are carting your own cage around with you
to the outer edge of the zoo. Everyone has their own captivity. The bars
separate everyone from everyone else. If that solitary snowman really exists,
without sex or partner, without birth or progeny or death,
roaming these mountains for a thousand years,
light and naked, how it must laugh as it moves among the cages.

Through us both

Before excuse me is this seat taken,
before the color of your eyes, before can I get you a drink,
before I’m Rico I’m Dita, before the fleeting touch
of a hand on a shoulder, it passed through us both
like a door opening a crack in your sleep.

Oz’s first poem got me thinking about the real inability to ever KNOW someone else’s human experience, even those who are closest to us. His image of a barred cage seperating us all is quite rigid. I would like to think—maybe hope—that the barriers that seperate us are not cages, but like water bubbles that can overlap to some extent, and are distinguishable only by their molecular dissimilarity which is, however unchangable, bearable. I find it intersting that these two poems were placed side-by-side in his book, the first suggesting the lonliness that can be life and the second revealing that despite that lonliness we will forever search for that sense of conncetion in other people.

Now that second poem, that’s what I’m talking about.  That connection must exist.  Then why are we so blind to it all the time?

Let something go.

If you let something go, and it truly loves you, then it will come back. 

Thats how the story goes, but what if it hasn’t gotten the chance to really love you?  Do you still let go?

Our souls go searching…

I often ask myself this of love:

Is love that which makes you obsess about someone else for no discernible reason?  Is it the smile and the butterflies you get in anticipation of that person’s arrival?  Is it the reason you stay in bed in your lovers embrace instead of going to work?  Is it that feeling you get after just meeting somebody and you know that there is something there?  Is it an essence? a super-natural feeling that defies all rules of logic and science to make us both the strongest and the weakest we could possibly be?

 or

Is love people who come together out of need?  Is it two people who know that they can’t face the world alone and so they find somebody that they can get along with well enough to face it together?  Is it something learned? Is it something that just grows stronger until eventually one learns that they can no longer function without their beloved?  

Who knows if there even is an answer.  But our souls go searching.