I am jealous of him, and I miss him, in both the way a needy girlfriend craves attention and in the way you miss tossing your hair over your shoulder when it gets cut off or miss the outline between the trees of sky when suddenly the winter's gone. The way it is with that old cliche about not knowing how much you love respect appreciate etc something until you lose it--that is how I feel this week about him and I tell him this. Over text message, cuz it's the only way I can. You'll only have the number of real, true friends in your life that you can count on one hand is a line I was raised on, heard again again and again and so I value so strongly the connections I have with folks and understand what a brave and great gift it is to be "friend." If this exact axiom is true or not I dont know tho, it hasn't been my whole life yet or at least I hope not, but it is true that there are to me legit qualifiers for true friends. And so as men go, he qualifies, really currently he is only one of two men who do. My bro is the other one.
He texts about getting lunch and I agree because I know he is on Artist's Retreat and still was willing to reach out to the needy-girlfriend part in me. He's not my boyfriend we are not at all romantic we long ago discussed and then established that, it's just that he's filled such a huge role and taught me to trust again so maybe there's some of my possessiveness. We go to the Market where we always almost every Thursday go and standing in line I ask him to tell me about how it's going and that is when I realize I am jealous. When he talks about the songs he's completed, the songs he's writing, the songs he's going to record. When he starts talking about getting up at 8 and working all day.
What will it look like for me? Working all day? I found this quote from Rilke this morning.
Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them. Consider yourself and your feeling right every time with regard to every such argumentation, discussion or introduction; if you are wrong after all, the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly and with time to other insights. Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything. Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life: in understanding as in creating.
This confirmed for me what I am struggling to maintain belief in because nowhere, practically nowhere in the daytoday grind do I see this valued: the inner life, the spirit and surrendering to the rhythms of me again, the tides of my own soul. I am on an Poet's Date with me right now, and I stuck to it today as it was pencilled in. 3 o'clock Poet's Date with You. Which means time uncharted with nothing to do but follow inside of me what I yearn for. I am writing, I just read Neruda and got transfixed on the spanish differences in assumption that can be made versus the english tranlation. y que la edad escribe letras/con agua y piedra para nadie,/para que nadie sepa donde,/para que nadie entienda nada again and again until it rolled like washed pebbles with gemstones inside over and over on my tongue. Until the words confused me, the words confused themselves, the translation was one thing the words something else the sound they made too its own thing the heartfusionmomentofactiontransaction on the tongue a total other. The time to do this--to be brave and foolish and quiet and sighing long enough to raise and then honor the song. No place to go but here, with me, alight alight alive and in the moment with my spirit and its wants and its needs. I think of Oregon, I picture it in my minds eye and sometimes I am on retreat and it is just reading long books in bed, stopping trailside to write down the words, laying on my back on the hot sand the sun marking me and the combination brine and green buoyant sea smell of the Coast. But sometimes it is, it is writing all day. And to me both kinds of work, the action kind and the priming honoring the tides and spirit of me are equally important.
We are so sick with the lac of it.
We are so sick with the need for it.
I saw it, wordless in his eye today and want that, that fire that transpires to speak greater languages than I currently can, that writes itself on my skin with its words that makes it so I dont even need to speak them because it speaks for me so great from in my soul. I saw it in him today and made myself be happy for him We're in this together remember he reminded me last week so I chose to be happy and let my jealousy go.
Afterall I had a date with me today and here I am now and am swept whole in that clean deep sigh inside glisten way from listening listening and submitting to the rhythms and tides so he's right, and back I go....
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