To Yearn

I watched Lost In Translation for about the tenth time today and it has settled in my mind for sure as one of my favorite movies. Every time I watch it, I like it more. I see more. I find more. I allow myself to perhaps translate more of that which Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are saying with their faces, which Sophia Coppola captured so beautifully in this film.

When I had finished watching it today, I thought for the first time that I knew what Bob had whispered to Charlotte before he took off for home and I thought I knew what her answer to him was, whispered back, and I studied those faces in the wordlessness which follows and I think I may be right and it doesn't even matter.

But if there were ever a movie in which yearning is made palpable, I think this one would be it. And I also think that yearning is something which, as we grow older, becomes smaller and yet, at the same time, sharper.
It's sort of like a knife blade which has been sharpened into razor thinness. It is not the same tool it once was, but its ability to cut has only become more powerful. It is too thin to use thoughtlessly- the blade is in danger of snapping. But. If the edge is touched, blood will flow.

Yes. I do love Bill Murray but it's not because he goes around and crashes on people's couches after participating in Karaoke parties, although that is an incredibly charming thing for him to do. It's because as he has grown older, he can, with his face, portray emotions I would not even have recognized as a young woman.
He translates them with that face of his.
I get lost in them, in those emotions, in his translation of them. I get lost in that face of his, that older, completely human and imperfect face which is a sort of perfection.

And that's what I'm thinking about on this chilly evening in North Florida and soon I'll be going to bed and it's all okay and I am filled with a sort of yearning myself and I'm not even sure for what but I know that it's human to yearn and it's part of the bargain of life and I'm okay with that.

For Stillness

The air feels dreamy this morning, and so do I. That thin line between awake and asleep hasn't been fully crossed yet and to make matters more so, I must have slept so hard on one side of my head that my eye is swollen and my vision is blurred from it and perhaps I am still asleep, just dreaming this wakefulness.

When I was walking out into this coolness to get the paper, to feed the cats, my thoughts began to rise up, the way they always do, accusing me of every sort of inadequacy. This is how I begin my day, every day. This morning, still asleep and dreaming, or half awake and dreaming, I thought, What if I just let those thoughts go unanswered? What if I just let them flow undisturbed and put my attention elsewhere?

I thought of my longtime friend who sits zazen every morning and has for many, many years. What does he do with thoughts? Is that what he does? Sit on the bank of the river of his thoughts, breathing and watching them flow, not bothering to disturb them, not bothering to dip into them as he notices the deer on the other side of the bank, come to sip?
I don't know.

The air is different. It makes us yearn, fall does. We are suspended between summer's hot struggle and winter's cold season of too-much and too-little. Can I just rest here, for a moment, dreaming of nothing but this moment? Can I let the river of too-hot and too-cold, too-still and too-furious pass on without having to submerge myself in that rush?

Can I stow my feelings away for a little while, like winter's sweaters when we no longer need them, let myself just breathe with what is?

I suppose it is a discipline, which seems oxymoronic, to have to work so hard to learn to let go.

It is cool this morning and the air where it touches my skin makes me yearn, makes me sad, makes me desire, makes me wonder.

It does not wake me up. It does not push me forward, it does not do anything but touch me this morning and that touching is enough, I suppose.

I suppose it is. I suppose it is.

It's Not The Heat, It's The Humility

I think something's going around. Everyone seems crazy.
Or is it just me?
Yesterday was a day of just feeling damn good about being alive and feeling fine. No bipolar mania there, just the calm serenity and acceptance of a very good life.
Today I woke up, did basically the same things as yesterday, and yet I feel as if I have wasted my entire life.
What causes these changes in attitude?
Is it all just chemicals? Do the stars impel us, or perhaps even compel us? Is it the barometric pressure?
All I know is that I keep finding myself wishing I could be in Roseland, staying by myself at that little cabana house beside the mythical pool of my childhood dreams.
Oh! Just to sit on that dock with the Sebastian River flowing beneath me, the sun about to set, the water roiling as the fishes go about their frantic evening feeding, the great blue heron balanced regally on one leg on the sandbar, the clouds above me scudding across before a threatening storm, the bamboo playing a rattling, clattering music on the bank in the wind.
How can a place that's less than half-a-day's drive seem so far away? As unobtainable as a trip to the pyramids of Egypt?
I don't know, but if I were there, I would stand on that dock with my face to the wind and I would not stop watching until the night had swallowed all the light and I had somehow managed how to incorporate all of me into one piece of wholeness again.