tension
For all our efforts to stay in the present, we live our lives in two directions. An indivisible self stretched across what has been and what could still be. This is the climate of the human condition. The weather patterns of our being.
All our feelings move backwards and forwards simultaneously. Regret, grief, and nostalgia pull us towards the rearview reflection of things. The people and places lost that we can never get back to. Hopefulness and yearning for what once was and a mourning over a future that will never be.
“Any genuine encounter with reality,” Abraham Joshua Heschel says, “is an encounter with the unknown.” Our task then, not only as makers but as people, as human beings, is to live and move and breathe within the unresolvable-ness of the in-between. We carry every absence and hold ourselves open to every new possibility. This is the epitome of what presence is. To find peace within the unresolvable. To find stillness and solace in the tension. Comfort within uncertainty. To uncover a melancholic joy in the unknowing.
This is what living is.
This is what beauty means.
May you find rest in the unfinished.
May the ache of what was and what might be hold you gently.
May the not-knowing be enough for you.
In case no one’s told you today, I love you with all my everything.
***special thanks to Charity Whan for giving me the title for “bitter plus nothing”. and thanks to Susanne Helmert for the photogram used in “to distant points in the future”.
I’m out celebrating my 75th birthday brunch. I’m so sorry to miss the meetup!!!! I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks. Have fun everyone!🤩
I needed this. x