525: Flow
Present and open, the exquisite machinery of the experience.
Suspending judgements, all out roads merge inward.
Face turned to the sensory rain.
Wide eyes and soul agape
Flow.
Present and open, the exquisite machinery of the experience.
Suspending judgements, all out roads merge inward.
Face turned to the sensory rain.
Wide eyes and soul agape
Flow.
Once in a while expose your bones to cold weather, and take with a break-away suddenness, a walk into the Winter morning to exhilarate your torpid nerves before you perpend yourself out of the experience. Let lead for once the thrill of sensation. The speed of touch and affect over bracing. Bracing means a gap of preparations, and I am calling for an instance free of the constructions and mental entanglements we’ve spun to hold on and make it through what’s yet to arrive and may never, and so make it rather difficult to just. Let. Go.
And exist. Right where you are, as you are and not between points or making ground. Connected and attuned. We’re too oft in our heads and not enough in the pulse. We read terrain and trajectory of obstacles like puddles and misremember the lawless joy of our childhoods when kicking Autumn leaves and standing in the grass with no shoes on our feet was as natural as smiling, and we’ve forgotten too; that smiling can in fact precede the feeling it represents.
I went out so this morning near as blank and perfect as when I was born, as the last of the blue-dark sky paled and revealed to me a restlessness in the horizon toward which I went unguarded and presenting the senses bare to the rush of impressions all. You forget, how an Arctic air can quicken the spirits, and silence the mind. You forget.
It helps if there is little sun, or none to spoil the honest intimacy with its bursts of cosy cheerfulness, but above all, be absorbed, and let that be all then. Depart from your schedule with zeal into an engagement with your surroundings and open entirely to the emotional resonance with which the Universe reaches you. Receive the scene and its vastness for what it is. Embrace the rain of innervation. Permit the air to bite your lungs and tighten your flesh. Your muscles to contract and shudder, and to shake your speculating loose of taking root. A keen awareness will awaken, dilate, and throb in you, coursing your halls, weaving and electrifying, threading you back into a supernal fold, to which you belong. You are an organic being. Not simply the sum of the things that you’ve done, will do or concentrate on. It is not so much what you feel that counts, but what you think about how you feel, when you do.
We were lucky with the weather, as fine days seemed to follow us mostly everywhere we went. Though it was the middle of Summer, the temperatures were as high as 30 to mid 30’s in Santiago, then dropped to around 4 deg Celsius I think, in Ushuaia. The wind could be quite fierce at times and meeting up with rain, it made for very unpleasant trekking conditions. Lots and lots of layers needed sometimes and it was always difficult to predict, changing from one moment to the next. It really is a very special place, and probably one of the better things I have experienced in my life so far.
Can it not be said, that only he can meet calm and relief who is storm-worn and standing and who has not stumbled thus his respiring? Who has allowed his balance to find him by at last keeping still though else nothing is, and having flung to the gusts for the valley below his charge and strain of striving vain. By not gripped by the incertitude of factual things such as winds and aims, they ceased to fatigue him and fell away into vanishment the more he fought them not. He has seen his depths and caring less for heights is happy if he can burn the day sitting on the adret of his Himalaya, to finish a good book and gathering there in himself like the snow and sunlight around him, and passing unhindered through his own being like the tide of ordinance.
If you chance reside near the ocean, a shimmering freshwater basin perhaps, or some sparkling sky-blue inlet stream brushed with the green-apple tips of Willow that whisper in the Springtime breeze, and stir with timid charm the clear and delicious waters passing underneath through which the pebble floor and all animation of life therein is visible, into the shade of an Arcadian dale. Bubbling liquid of the purest dreamable state drawn and descended of lofty snow-laced spires which address the very cloud-scape grounds call angels home. Well, have you then at your grace, wanderer, a fount of the finest available natural sustenance known, and necessary wealth, of which you too are mostly comprised, sufficient in one gratifying instant of submersion to dissolve your cares and quicken the spirits there back to ambrosial health and exquisite humour. The holy sinking sensation of being one and relation to Nature, suddenly home and alive again.
I have been several uncompressed days, without an account of my becoming, and delighting in the contours and tone of a new morning sky has long been increments clear of reach. For those wonton days leave little to heave upon the pages then, and all the disenthralled while I was courting distraction has Nature borne the lonely anniversaries with hushed distress, waiting at the window dressed in Spring light.
Between us I put every bleakness. I am the sole bringer of the sleet that piles sable on our sill. I closed tight our portal, by coarse inattention, wandering terribly, failing, and still would She not know how to produce an unfair Winter. Her fits She takes for thunder but apologetic snow flakes prove, swirling for some place to be hid of the shame and Her warmth by soon dispelled. She will not withal long let me brood to trivialities, sighing unawares the breeze finds fissure under my glacial coat to the busied consciousness leads, and I am saved! Saved at last from what grave hex overtook, when all thy severest balm did nothing dissuade. It amounted to a whisper, my rescue; surrounded and agonisingly crystal –
Your mundane duties, forswear. Come back to me.
Man, never your eyes avert, whence being gone must some part return; to reconcile with Universe.