Reifyn: July 2014

Friday, July 18, 2014

Songs of Innocence and Experience

WELL, I HAVE BEEN delayed in going to The North...so, although I'll likely pass other birds heading south, I will try and fly away closer to the autumn. Meantime I have been packing and getting rid of stuff and scanning (one page at a time) all my journals. I'm amazed at so much of the content, some of which I don't recall at all, and many of the passages I read seem like they were written by somebody else. I am aware of so much intense hope that I no longer possess, having become a realist I suppose, perforce. I recall James Branch Cabell once wrote, 'The optimist believes we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears that this is true.' He goes on to relate that the character he was then writing on was a Realist, quite a different person altogether. For me I'd rather be a Surrealist, which you can no doubt tell by reading this blog. I'm surprised I'm still posting here, actually; but I have occasioned some new people reading these days, and I'm glad they have taken an interest. Here are a few pics from my journals.

A Cardinal (Just for Carmine, whom I know likes them)

Yes, I probably do own shares in LARABAR by now

If you've never read THE ARRIVAL by Shaun Tan, you will love it

Ever wonder where bicycles come from? Now you know

This scene is mentioned in one of my earliest posts—'Creature Confrontations'

Baba Yaga's Hut appears in 3 different journals

No caption would do justice to this pic...Amen, indeed

Hope, a bird of beautiful plumage ~ Fear Not, for I am here (those were the days...)

I must have made the above entry in 2010 or so;

but I've only just noticed the 'current' nature of the

topics: upper right reads 'North This Way Please',

further proof that each person's life is a single unit,

not made up of linear 'moments', and therefore we

can anticipate any point in our existence.
And as such, Hope and Lack-of-Hope are equal and
both present, and therefore neither is any more
important than the other. But our experience
in Life is such that we do not always recall and
treat equal each 'moment' we separate our life
into, which we do in order to understand it as
a mortal experience.
~
These things are easy to say; but to live them
I find takes considerable courage and a renewed
sense of innocence that allows us to accept all
these 'moments' that make up our life.

Thankfulness

I think we expect some sort of definitive resolve or outcome to things in life. I'm not sure progress is about that...at least not for me. The spiritual being that has chosen to inhabit these days I call my life chose a very strange path: one where the cards are some of the poorest possible; and where, no matter what happens, there is no obvious resolve. I have only just begun realising what a great gift not having things work out in a certain way is. Not to mention getting handed sometimes terrible things & trying to understand what to do with them. I am thankful that things are complex & difficult, because it makes me know that I must be rare enough to stay in the game with such dreadful cards, and where life is never ever easy & the dice only come up 1s or 2s. So my hope for anyone (as strange as it sounds) is that life will not have easy choices or paths: I find this is the way to powerful change—& that those changes are from Within, & the Without is not as important. -Reifyn

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language, not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book that is written in that tongue.

Man...is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.