The most terrifying thing to me right now is not that things are hostile, but they are indifferent.
Indifference! This is what I have been experiencing a lot in the last year. When I was a child, I believed everyone was the same and it never occurred to me that differences could separate. Indifference is a lack of interest or concern. That baffles me, still, today. And, it is a “thing” in our world right now…at a personal level and a collective. It baffles me.
Last night, after 3 days of renovating the house (again) in a madwoman way, I noticed a strum on Jimi’s guitar. It just sounded like someone bumped the guitar. A cat? A bug? I checked it out. Nada! Then it happened again and again and again and into the night. I asked a friend who knows guitars if this is normal and explained in musical terms. Maybe a temperature or humidity thing. The response was that it can happen but maybe once or twice. Tension, I suppose, on the wood and string causing the pull of sound. It happened maybe 20 times.
Now, I must digress because I have always felt I am a women of deep faith. The things I have done in my life led by belief is extreme. I must say that the experience of late has put in another realm of questions. It is not that I have lost faith, I just don’t know anymore. It is open…but I am wiser than I was in my younger years. I am not following an intrigue or notion anymore. I am leary of the left and reactive to the right. I think I know enough to realize much of what I thought is manipulated. In this light, I have made mistakes and follow a path of unending questions. It never ends. For some reason, I never settled…never bought in and never accepted. So, I find myself in a situation where I don’t know.
Rather than seeking closure or finality, I now tend to live into the open-endedness of things. I lost my dad, my partner and I lost my daughter and grand-daughter. I get that my experience of meaning is never complete and the rivers of meaning from which I drink are never dry in persuasion. I am not one to give up. But, I have some sense of peace in not knowing anymore.
Was that Jim talking through his guitar? I don’t know. From this perspective, I shift my focus from searching for some abstract answer that fits into a simple sentence and be more focused on the experience of meaning as it washes through my world in its endless (and appearingly slow) configurations. i would truly like to hear from Jim again. If he is trying, I want to know. But, reality, I don’t. So, I have patience and wait…for more, for proof, for possibility.
As Rainer Maria Rilke’s notions, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Things, for me, have meaning. That doesn’t mean I make up. There is a difference in the quality of being meaningful and/or meaningless. Insisting that everything is meaningful is eternalism. Insisting that nothing is meaningful is nihilism. I have so many questions around this! I am not being indifferent. i am just being. I am being honest and real. After all, that constrains and muffles indifference. Both eternalism and nihilism are not a part of me.
So, as Rainer Maria Rilke’s notions again…because it is sooooo powerful…. “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
I don’t have the answers.
I am patient
I have a lot unresolved.
I love the questions.
I am just doing my best.
The guitar strums…and calls me. I can’t explain it and I don’t want to make shit up. So, I let it be….meaningfulness that is not meaningless.
Love
