this blurred life

While I can pinpoint specific moments in my life when I've been truly awake -- or at least as close to being truly awake as it was possible for me to be -- these moments have been few and far between. Most of the time I have little awareness of my surroundings or my state of mind.

Is this okay? Should something be done about it?

I wish I could *do* something about it -- I wish I could just wake up and stay awake. But until that happens, I am comforted by knowing that others have had a similar experience. Here are two poems that speak to the fleeting transience of awareness.

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Because These Failures Are My Job

This morning I failed to notice the pearl-gray moment
just before sunrise when everything lightens; 
failed also to find bird song under the grinding of garbage trucks,
and later, walking through woods, to stop thinking, thinking,
for even five consecutive steps. Then there was the failure to name
the exact shade of blue overhead, not sapphire, not azure, not delft,
to savor the soft squelch of pine needles underfoot. 
Later I found the fork raised halfway to my mouth
while I was still chewing the last untasted bit,
and so it went, until finally, wading into sleep's thick undertow,
I felt myself drift from dream to dream,
forever failing to comprehend where I am falling from or to:
this blurred life with only moments caught
in attention's loose sieve --
tiny pearls fished out of oblivion's sea,
laid out here as offering or apology or thank you

- Alison Luterman

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Balance

I watched the arctic landscape from above
and thought of nothing, lovely nothing.
I observed white canopies of clouds, vast
expanses where no wolf tracks could be found.

I thought about you and about the emptiness
that can promise one thing only: plenitude—
and that a certain sort of snowy wasteland
bursts from a surfeit of happiness.

As we drew closer to our landing,
the vulnerable earth emerged among the clouds,
comic gardens forgotten by their owners,
pale grass plagued by winter and the wind.

I put my book down and for an instant felt
a perfect balance between waking and dreams.
But when the plane touched concrete, then
assiduously circled the airport's labryinth,

I once again knew nothing. The darkness
of daily wanderings resumed, the day's sweet darkness,
the darkness of the voice that counts and measures,
remembers and forgets.

- Adam Zagajewski

whose silence are you?

Who are you? 

I think I usually try to answer this question by making statements about what I believe/wish to my personality traits or interests: I'm a caring person. I'm into yoga. I listen to NPR. Constructing an identity for myself in this way is comforting because it makes me feel like I've figured myself out, like I finally know my place in this world and what I ought to be doing with my time. 

And yet it seems somehow ludicrous to imagine that I -- or anyone -- could be summed up by a flat paper list of interests and characteristics, a Facebook page.

So what is beneath this surface, and how can I access it?

I've come across a couple of things recently that address this question:

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"As you begin to befriend your inner silence, one of the first things you will notice is the superficial chatter on the surface level of your mind. Once you recognize this, the silence deepens. A distinction begins to emerge between the images that you have of yourself and your own deeper nature. Sometimes much of the conflict in our spirituality has nothing to do with our deeper nature but rather with the false surface constructs we build. We then get caught in working out a grammar and geometry of how these surface images and positions relate to each other; meanwhile our deeper nature remains unattended."

- Anam Cara, John O'Donohue

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In Silence

Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
to speak your

Name.
Listen
to the living walls.

Who are you?
Who
are you? Whose
silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
are you (as these stones
are quiet). Do not
think of what you are
still less of
what you may one day be.

Rather
be what you are (but who?)
be the unthinkable one
you do not know.

O be still, while
you are still alive,
and all things live around you

speaking (I do not hear)
to your own being,
speaking by the unknown
that is in you and in themselves.

“I will try, like them
to be my own silence:
and this is difficult. The whole
world is secretly on fire. The stones
burn, even the stones they burn me.
How can a man be still or
listen to all things burning?
How can he dare to sit with them
when all their silence is on fire?”

- Thomas Merton

be earth now, and evensong

I've been reading Rilke recently, The Book of Hours. There's a great preface in the edition I have, where the two translators (Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy) each explain what Rilke's poems mean to them. Anita Barrows writes about an experience walking home from Sabbath services with her father when she was six years old:

"There on the boulevard, amid the noise and bustle of Brooklyn, was this delicious mulching smell, this crispness, this crackling noise of dry red and yellow leaves. The smell awakened me after the morning spent in the dim, drafty synagogue, where I had to sit upstairs listening to the men chanting below in a language I did not understand. God made these leaves, this smell, I said to myself, and suddenly it occurred to me that God created the world because he was lonely. He needed it -- needed the ripeness of autumn, the bright air, the sunlight making patterns on the sidewalk through linden leaves that were yet unfallen. God had created all this, and us as well, to keep him company. That far, chilly place where he lived had felt empty to him without our world."

Perhaps leaves and rivers and stones are just cold, solid objects, and perhaps my thoughts are simply neurons firing. But when I am reading Rilke, I feel that I, and they -- and all of this -- are somehow sacred. Rilke's poems are openings in the clouds, fleeting glimpses into the deeper, spiritual nature of the physical world and of my experience in it. They urge me to look deeper, to pay attention, to do whatever I can to connect with myself, with the world, and with the people in it.

from The Book of Hours:

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In deep nights I dig for you like treasure.
For all I have seen
that clutters the surface of my world
is poor and paltry substitute
for the beauty of you
that has not happened yet...

My hands are bloody from digging.
I lift them, hold them open in the wind,
so they can branch like a tree.

Reaching, these hands would pull you out of the sky
as if you had shattered there,
dashed yourself to pieces in some wild impatience.

What is this I feel falling now,
falling on this parched earth,
softly,
like a spring rain?

- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours, II, 34

*******

You are not surprised at the force of the storm --

you have seen it growing.

The trees flee. Their flight

sets the boulevards streaming. And you know: 

he whom they flee is the one

you move toward. All your senses

sing him, as you stand at the window.

The weeks stood still in summer.

The trees' blood rose. Now you feel

it wants to sink back

into the source of everything. You thought

you could trust the power 

when you plucked the fruit;

now it becomes a riddle again,

and you again a stranger.

Summer was like your house: you knew

where each thing stood. 

Now you must go out into your heart 

as onto a vast plain. Now

the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb, the wind

sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.

It is what you have.

Be earth now, and evensong.

Be the ground lying under that sky.

Be modest now, like a thing

ripened until it is real,

so that he who began it all

can feel you when he reaches for you.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours, II, 1