God said to Abraham, "Leave your country, your family, your father's house, and walk inward to the land I will show you." This is what true spirituality demands: to leave everything we know; to relinquish everything we are...simply trusting that when we get "there..." we will know. Buddha did that. So did Lao Tzu, Jesus, and Mohammed. They all left home. But we do just the opposite. Worse! We take refuge in those who taught No Refuge. We imitate those who demanded No Imitation. We study each other's floor plans, and borrow each other's furniture, when what we really need is to leave home.
-Rabbi Rami M. Shapiro
Hello, and welcome to my miserable attempt at marking the day I began writing my obituary ... It is hard to believe that it was 25 years ago exactly ... Is the self that is conscious of being alive in the present meaningfully continuous with any version of the self in the past? I have journal entries from years ago, describing the exact feelings I face today. For a host of reasons the return of old feelings and reminders lurk on. Reminders aren't just tied to the calendar. They can be anywhere — in sights, sounds and smells, in the news or on television programs. And they can ambush you, suddenly flooding you with emotions when you drive by the restaurant your sister loved or when you hear a song your friend liked so much.
Since early morning I have spent quite a bit of time sitting here, trying to think how can I revisit my thoughts about a certain river incident, but I am failing miserably. I'd like to add something deep and meaningful here but I don't have the words, so I'll copy a paste my old attempt Strictly Iron Curtain: One Man Survives a Crossing
Beyond Grief: Politics is the art of the possible
When loved people die, they are agonizingly present – hyper-present – in our heads, and agonizingly absent everywhere else. All over the mind, like ink spilled on a table, cherry juice poured over ice cream, saturating everything – and nowhere at all, nowhere to be found, always always missing, gone, not there, absent – a hole, a blank, a negation, a continuous ever-renewed check, stopping, lack, gone-ness – in the real world.
Once there were three of us but now I am the only one. These were friends with whom I was certain I would grow old. We had known each other from school and ar,y days. We were one soul in three bodies. Some part of their death reached out to us all.
• So so so true. Life ebbs and flows Did I really crossed that? Destined for Immortality like a heavy axe in the distance chopping into a wet log [Ernest Hemingway, in a moment of drunken self-parody, once described world literature as a boxing circuit. The only matchups that scared him, he said, were against the traditional Russian heavyweights: Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy. I've often seen that little acts of evil come together and form a bigger one – a theme in all Slavic literature – and the same is true of little acts of kindness Dream as if you'll Live Forever; and Live as if you'll Die Today ; No one, who could have heard my emotional screams and saw the look of terror on my face could doubt for a single minute that I was actually in a place called hell! Digging up the surreal mirrors of truth ]
• · After the Velvet Revolution, I Count Myself Lucky to be Living in the Age of Digital Revolution. I want to live among the broken, because I too am broken, and I believe it's only in our brokenness that we find freedom and hope. I want to remain a dreamer ;
• · · Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor -- never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman ; The road to Gulags was built by hate but paved with indifference Cold River: Against all odds
• · · · No war, cold or hot, missed this tortured people ... As you all know, Czechoslovakia was then ruled by one of the most repressive regimes on earth. The conventional wisdom was that it would be the last of the Soviet satellites to undertake reform Prague's Second Spring ; The cause of Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution seems to be primarily shrouded in fog. Despite typical Western assertions, the primary building block for the Velvet Revolution appears to have been the revival of conscience and morality in Czechoslovakia A touch of velvet ; It is amazing that no person active in the cruel and murderous Communist regime in Slovakia or former Czechoslovakia was ever brought to justice. Everything is usually blamed on the "Totality". As if some abstract thing called "Totality" and not certain human beings tortured, imprisoned, deported and killed the many innocent citizens living in Slovakia from 1948 to 1989. There were a very few indictments and none resulted in a conviction Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death
• · · · · Back in September 1980, I was in Villawood, my Hollywood, when it was considered a place of hope ... In the Cornelia Rau case it looks like Immigration officials used the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn as a guide, when they were not following Franz Kafka Cornelia Rau case a national disgrace Escape stories are not for the faint-hearted nor those who wish to remain deluded, but for everyone else political escape is a relief, like the collective popping of every helium balloon-headed star. I am way too bohemian to be razor-sharp wise, but hopefully my observations and links will cut apart why irony laced with caustic tone is sometimes necessary Where has all the water under the Cold River’s Bridge Gone? ; Like the cold there is no cure for grief. We may never be the same again. And this is an unwelcome reality Coping strategies
• · · · · · For Dvorák, the Stabat Mater was a work brought about by personal tragedy of almost incomprehensible proportions. He lost all three of his then living children: In the refrain of Just an Accident, the soprano sings: Life is fragile. Death is final. Any one of us can leave this hall, turn a corner and be no more. Dvorak Means Intense Harmony to Me; Not unlike acts of reading literature, acts of diagnostic listening enlist the listener's interior resources--memories, associations, curiosities, creativity, interpretive powers, allusions to other stories told by this teller and others--to identify meaning. 'What is wrong with me?' 'Why did this happen to me?' 'What will become of me?' This is where literary experiences come in. By partaking in the catharsis of the pity and fear of a great drama, we inevitably put our theatrical experience in relation to our emotional knowledge Through Hamlet to Narrative Escape ; How to be a perfect stranger ; Where would literature be without drowning if the remorseless deep had not closed over the head of Lycidas? or if Orpheus had not floated down the swift Hebrus, dismembered by the rout that made the hideous roar, but singing still. Rivers have received a great many things over the years as offerings - swords, flowers, blood, lamps, bullocks and girls in bridal costume Beyond Death's Door: Rivers compete in malice
Life is like a very short visit to a toyshop between birth and death.
-Desmond Morris