“People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents,” James Baldwin
Our personal narratives are interwoven with stories of pain and love; we must allow ourselves to acknowledge the fact of how we dance daily between pleasure and pain. We must be able to confront and address the shadow in our lives; every episode of unrequited love, desire to love, failure, disappointment, and, even, the need to be patient, all are parts of our story that needs to be respected and integrated into our understanding. We cannot run from ourselves, and any attempt will only bring our despair and the selves will hide into our bed. This fear of facing ourselves prevents us from facing the people around us. The flesh carries our beauty, our scars, bruises, strength, history, hunger, thirst, loneliness, but the mind carries our potential to transform our existence into more than a product of our experiences. Our entire lives have to be analyzed and the way we look at the world has to be critiqued and remolded.
“It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case.” -Rainer Maria Rilke
Love, I believe, is a person dedicated to the nurturing of his spirit, and he does the same for the person he loves. This love comes either through a mystical synchronicity or an attunement to the internal loveliness of our lives. We must learn to nurture our being, so we can love people correctly; we must learn to become a light for ourselves when it is difficult. Love is the ultimate path, but during times of darkness it seems no light will shine during this time. Only by bearing the weight of this darkness can we discover the life that burns inside us; this burning is the light we will carry through every episode of our lives. We must actively work towards a life that is built, dictated, and guided by the principles of love and acceptance of death; life does not have to be a battle against death because they are dependent on each other. To live we must accept the entirety of our experience while striving for a deeper relationship with the inner mechanisms of our lives. We must tell our truth and share the wisdom that has been digested.
“And in fact the artist’s experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss. And if instead of “heat” one could say “sex”;- sex in the great, pure sense of the word, free of any sin attached to it by the Church, — then his art would be very great and infinitely important. His poetic power is great and as strong as a primal instinct; it has its own relentless rhythms in itself and explodes from him like a volcano.”― Rainer Maria Rilke