Learning

To love and to not hurt the loved one: these are powerful gifts, the consistent bestowal of both of which are forever challenging. The seemingly long time spent waiting for the splash of a rock tossed down the cavernous well of one's psyche is eventually rewarded and assures the patient one that compassion, in the form of these recessed yet deep (and still) waters responding to the loving stone (which is akin to an Apache tear of the beloved) is a life force that one, by definition, has shared. These bitter tears may never melt; no alchemy empowers my limited liquid refreshment.  But I know that I  have some capacity to alleviate pain and am heartened. There is little left but to love and to hope that the sorrow may be smothered with enough good cheer and the annihilation of each, single solitary selfish impulse. Failure is nearly inevitable unless one were to faithfully relive vividly that moment of abject misery when my beloved bewails the throb of her searing wound born from a horrifying mirage of uselessness.  It's not difficult to try to comfort such vulnerability and a fine line between pity and empathy wiggles and blurs while lacrimation as contagion shoves impotent reason aside. The Christian view slakes this special thirst and the crying is its fleshly manifestation and purging.

Sometimes when alone (and someday perhaps to be the usual state of affairs), the grieving is harder, with dry tears and a burning melancholia in the throat and stomach. The knowledge arrives that no gentle touch will ever come and that one's escapes and tricks to gain attention, comfort or approval is all for naught. The computer, the attractions of the pantry, the long telephone conversations with equally lonely souls, the favored musical genres (and the simple pleasure of controlling nearly anytime while at home the playing of soothing selections of them), the distraction of a pretty smile, or a wink from a coarser sensibility... all these anesthetize and bring symptomatic relief which is no small thing.

And yet, time and again and frankly not rarely, conflict is actively sought. The insult (real or imagined), the wounded pride, the itch to avenge a bully's taunt (whether oafish or subtly directed) and the bile produced by the bloodsport of politics and tribalism, all pollute the search for serenity and for a higher plane of being. The simple need for space ought not be overlooked. Ranting about urban blight, a mainstay of this blogger's litany of complaints, is a very ancient sore point for many a modern citizen since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Am among those who do not just rhapsodize about what some may dismissively term a silly sentimentality for a sylvan and tranquil world that is no more. No, we who long for quietude and room to expand a peaceful solitude are not crackpots or deluded dreamers. What is sought is the physical reflection of the inner bliss that one envisions and perhaps once had, even if only in an imagined previous existence.  The yearning has a purpose and the small voice should be listened to, heeded and trusted.