The Search

I'm listening to The National's Alligator and The Boxer as I write this.

These have been albums that have been playing a lot in this room of mine for the last few months.

(as my flatmates will surely tell you, bless 'em...)

I have tried to pinpoint exactly why I can't seem to stop listening to them. Why every time these tracks just take me to a very special place. How more than the words, the music or the voice, there's something in there that just clicks.

Just now I went to the bathroom and I was thinking about this. And I was thinking that perhaps throughout our lives we spend a lot of time searching for something out there that matches exactly who we are. We find moments, fragments, glimpses of lives, people, music, words, scents, flavours, impressions, memories, etc.

Obviously, whenever we find these things, we try to cling on to them. They are so rare, so precious!

Perhaps this is what has happened with this band.

I have loved music deeply for a long time. I'm one of those people that will sometimes hear a beautiful song inside my head, dolby stereo and all, better than a live concert. These moments are rare, but when they happen they just take me away. They are more powerful than what is around me.

I think that with this band and these two albums perhaps I have simply reached closer to what I would love to have reached myself with music but never managed to. They somehow mirror a deeper me. As much as sounds and words and shapes can describe it.

This is why I love the lyrics because they tell more than what they say. They're like this Gene Wolfe book in music. The story been read through the lines and in between them. And more stories hinted at. And life, all the while, shining gloriously above it all. An overwhelming sense of purity through whatever is being shared.

"My bodyguard shows her revolver
To anyone who asks"

I can't explain why but lines like these just enter to the core of me and I feel that I am in touch with an incredible distillation of everything that surrounds me.

"I wish I believed in fate
I wish I didn't sleep so late"

At each moment more and more of these reach me. And, I guess these sate me but also open me up to find out and figure out more of this whole makeup that makes the "I" which is so engrossing.

As I was thinking about this I was also thinking about a couple of emails friends sent just today and that affected me deeply albeit in very different ways.
I don't know if you feel this but, quite often lately, I can feel the electrical rewiring of the brain when something affects me deeply. It's the only way I can explain it. It's a feeling quite different from a headache or something because it's much quicker, it's like a flash in your brain, a quick surge that seems to burn momentarily and then vanish as soon as attention is directed towards it. As soon as observation absorbs it perhaps.

But, most of all, I was trying to observe my own feelings and expectations in relation to both those emails, the stuff that they were lifting within me.
I was observing how easily the world takes us in its stride when it touches things we deem important. Be it our "realities" or our "fantasies". We are simply taken in the story happening and that, obviously, we are creating also.

This is why, in all this searching for perfection (or whatever we may want to call it) we always end up meeting ourselves. That external search is nothing but the internal struggle to find what we know is the deepest of our nature. A well of uncontaminated true nature.
We reach into the profound all around us, trying to find a way in.
And sometimes the universe replies. And points right back at us. giving us the flavour of the moment.

Peace.

Strange Encounters

Last sunday I was returning home, on a train headed to London Liverpool. I had spent the last two or three days having a few ideas for a project of mine and I had been reading a book on the life of Jesus (the part of his life that isn't mentioned in the bible).

So I was entertaining all these historical and philosophical viewpoints on existence, saviour complex, religion and meditative experience when life decided to knock down the door.

The train doors opened and this drunken guy in his mid fifties or something came in and sat opposite to me, on the other side of the train.

I tried to keep to myself but he started talking. And, as it usually happens, even though I did not want to hear what he was saying I couldn't help but hear.

He kept complaining about his life and how it was worthless now that his mom and sister had both died, within a short time of one another. He cried a bit here and there. I felt I should comfort him in some way only I didn't know how.

These situations are awkward. You want to do something but, I at least, just don't know what. I mean, it was obvious that he wanted attention and someone to listen to him. Especially after he noticed me actually paying attention to what he was saying.

I thought, here I am, reading all this stuff about Jesus and yet I'm utterly unable to interact in a positive way. I mean, the guy was saying that he was going to commit suicide and everything. Now I know that, if this happens, it's probably because they're never going to do it. But, just how much should we chance with our silence?

I don't know how we engaged but the fact remains that we did. We started talking.

And his story started to unwind.

If I am to believe what he told me (and I have no reason to doubt - his emotions were far too real for him to be faking it) then this man was an ex-colonel from the army and he was, at some point, stationed in Afghanistan.

And he saw some of his buddies being blown to bits.
One moment they were there.
The next they were fragments and red blood all over the place.

And the question he kept asking was why?
Why to kill someone?
Why make war on someone we don't even know or see?
Why them instead of me?

Last week I read Waltz With Bashir. An amazing graphic novel that I urge everybody to read if they want to know a bit more about what war experience really is about.
Some people will block out things so much they won't even remember them anymore.
But some will always remember.
And, in one way or another, all will have to live with the weight of those memories. Either by recognising something they can never remove from them, or by feeling that a part of them has been lost.

So, to a certain extent, I was more ready to empathise with him.

I told him that it is ok to cry. That he should live to honour the memory of those that he knew that died. That life is worthwhile living. That he should give himself another chance. That he should see a doctor and do a checkup. If he had someone, a professional ideally, that he could talk about these things. That the past is the past. That the past is there, not here. That he can still make a positive contribution and help others.

We both exited at Liverpool. We was supposed to have left in Stratford but he decided to stay a bit longer so that we could talk a bit more.

Throughout all this I was well aware that people sitting around in the train might be overhearing our conversation. But I tried to pay more attention to the man in front of me than to my thoughts of shame and of feeling exposed.

After leaving the train he told me about this love he has in the US and he asked me to pray for them both. He talked about Jesus and how there is a child in my life that is going (or will be) in a lot of problems but that everything will be alright after this is over. That i just need to have hope because all will be fine.

I didn't know really what to reply to that. I had felt that the initial purpose of the conversation had gone and that now it was time to depart.
He saw this of course. He saw my doubt of some of his words and sent it back at me. At least these days I'm a bit more comfortable with my own doubts and so more or less stayed my ground.

He also told me that, whenever I needed him, he would be there. Maybe we both would not know how, but he would.

I wished him well, for him to take care of himself, and I left.

I made my way back home thinking about all of this. About this story and the others floating around in my head. How everything sometimes seems to connect in these most unexpected ways.
This made think of that well known idea of how we create the reality around us. How there are no coincidences but only a convergence of factors, what is perhaps best known as the law of attraction, that there is an active, direct, continuous relationship between what happens inside of you and what's around you. And, existential concerns aside (ie, whatever is the nature of things), I believe that this is true to a great extent.

In any case, the purpose of this is not to drive any of you into my own existential dillemmas but simply to share with you an experience that affected me in some way. And that helped me escape some of my patterns.

I don't know if there's any lesson here to be extracted. I just feel that I am happy that I had the opportunity and seized it in this way.
More often than not I feel that if we ever are going to contribute to this world in a positive way, it's in simple things like this. Not by writing the book that will make everyone gasp but by being there when someone needs you. Especially if you don't even know that person and you have to cross that big boundary of the unknown (and the all too natural fear that comes with it) to reach him or her.
But also that, despite everything, books and words are a bit like the plough tending the field. It doesn't change the quality of the soil. But it helps making it ready for the planting.

Through the word we act.

Peace.

All I Cannot Tell You

I wish I could tell you how I feel.
But I can't.
Isn't that how feelings are supposed to be?
Without words?
Feelings are like circles. The circumference suggesting that which cannot truly be seen.
This is how I am, how I have been. Unseen.
Feelings are quicksand
and the struggle inside our minds
only makes us sink deeper
and lose ourselves within what we fear
and wish to avoid.
I wish I could tell you how it feels to grow up, have choices to make, making decisions, watching outcomes turn inside out, becoming us and changing again.
But I can't.
Each and everyone is trapped inside their own lives
That is our liberation
Our commonality.
I wish I could say all the things I think and dream that do not hurt but build beauty.
All the things that are precious to me and that I am unafraid to share.
I wish I could tell you how time brings so much and seems to take more than we can handle.
Sometimes.
But not always.
It's hard for me to say the things I want because everything escapes language.
Sometimes this is the only truth I know.
Sometimes I lose myself in awareness.
When that happens, what remains?
I try not be scared of my fear
and I try to trust my body to guide me
I loved to dream
and I dreamt of love
Now in dreaming or in loving I am unfulfilled.
I am an horizon without a landscape to support it
I am light that never reaches the eye
A sound taken by the wind
A shape never truly formed
I am the dream of something impossible waiting to happen