Nothingness: A Reflection
For this epiphany, I wrote myself a check of $800. What do you think?
I struggle through pain and nothingness with bouts of happiness and calmness of mind everyday. Maybe, I, too, suffer from some kind of mental illness I haven’t dared to find out. What’s certain is my constant search for peace that at times seems to end only for the battle to begin again. Here are some whiffs of calm wind that had helped:
“Restless until my heart rests in thee”, thus, St. Augustine simply puts what ails man. All Truth seems poured into these seven words, truths that Jesus lived and died for. He showed us and taught us what these truths are but why did He seem to make peace such an impossibility, indeed?
Why is life impregnable? Why is living a crucible? Jesus had a consistent answer—because to walk with God, to go home to Him in eternity is to shed the world at every single moment with every thought and every act. Otherwise we, who have wakened to this true path but have not really given in or have not learned to will what God wills or to simply break our will and turn it over to Him, will never find rest.
Until we ‘die to ourselves’ and be nothing in this life, as Jesus says again and again, our journey back home will be wrought with pain. “Die to ourselves”, how do we do that? Not to seek comfort or consolation for what we do, and to deny ourselves of that, which makes us happy (a momentary lift), perhaps? Pain is in the nature of this life, Jesus assured us. If He knew of another way to peace and salvation, being Truth Himself, he would have shown it certainly, shown something else other than having been impoverished, derided, betrayed, and crucified by this world in this existence, this finiteness.
No wonder, as St. Teresa of Avila once chided Jesus in all her humaneness, He had so few friends. Maybe, if we acknowledge our nothingness we could be considered among the few.
Posted in jendireiter.com
haiku
snow-clad trees
on spring morning
looking for robins
Because a haiku moment is rare for its purity, I give myself $500 as my ‘jornal’ for this. What do you think?
Spring snow
To wake up to snow-clad trees
but knobbed not bare-skinned
a streaming not of rain
on frosted glass but of
quiet snow frantic
in dance, winter as yet
reluctant to let
robins be as sparrows
sprint as if free.
To wake up not to
spring but snow-
bearded day delayed
in clockwork, stumbling
onto the breakfast
ledge spooning spring
against winter, buds
retracting in the snow
birds muted, quivering,
hearts like mine
suddenly uncertain.
I give myself $500 as ‘jornal’ for this thought that came as a poem and not as the essay I intended. Do you think my valuing is right?
To read a poem
is not to catch
the words unlatched:
it is to meet
a current against the sweep
against the words
the patterns on the board
the words imprint
that later fade unlike river silt.
To catch a poem
you can’t, unless eyes firm
eyes glued to the vaulted
deep from where had bolted
these words you read as poem
slumbered like death, awaiting a pen.
This is also posted in a slightly different version on iluko.com. For this reflection on poetry, I wrote myself a check of $800. Too much? If so, tell me why.
About
autumn wind
wondering about lilies
in a mountain pond
Tell me a writer who really gets a satisfying jornal, in Spanish a daily wage or its equivalent, and I’ll bare a spirit in constant bouts of doubtfulness. Does a writer earn more because of what he writes and how he does it? Or is a writer paid more or less because of who he is? Is it money or honor he expects to receive?
Ahhh … but money as wage, and praise or honor as reward would be too predictable, too common as Job lamented in the Book of Job. It is in these lines that read: “Is not man’s life on earth nothing more than pressed service, his times no better than hired drudgery? Like the slave, sighing for the shade, or the workman with no thought but his wages, months of delusion I have assigned to me, nothing for my own but nights of grief. Lying in bed I wonder, ‘When will it be day?’ Risen I think, ‘How slowly evening comes!’
Restlessly I fret till twilight falls. Swifter than a weaver’s shuttle my days have passed, and vanished, leaving no hope behind. Remember that my life is but a breath, and that my eyes will never again see joy.”
Not money but joy is the ultimate wage as the passage implies. And joy is not hard to earn for it is in everyday life if we have eyes to see, a nose to smell, fingers to touch, ears to hear–a heart beating. This to me, is how a writer earns a daily wage. His wages then take the guise of treasures his heart can transfigure into a universe of thought that taps into other hearts, that causes a swirl in the depth of other souls, or that makes wings to sprout on leaden heels.
Sometimes not joy but rueful, poignant moments are my pick. Take what I earned once: On my walk home in my neighborhood, I caught two clumps of snowdrops–such tiny blossoms smaller than fingertips that do not look up but shyly droop close to black patches on the ground winter has frozen. That afternoon in the frosty wind, they trembled as if ready to turn away and run but how could they? For that poignant moment on seeing the wintry rain beat on the fragile snowdrop–as if pushing it to go home now, go to sleep–I earned my jornal, my daily wage.
Once on summer walk, the crackle of dried leaves just hit me both like the laughter of children and sobs long suppressed. Neither one of them would resolve the dryness, but I recalled how each does bring tears: laughter for joy, sobs for healing that comes with the release of a dammed-up pain. My jornal that day came as two haiku.
Fall has since shortened the day and the heart begins to crave for lost space that it doesn’t even recall which or where. I feel that most treasures have turned into mush so much so I wouldn’t be able to sift them off the ground. Yet I caught the dying day yesterday–so glorious in the gold of autumn it opened a flip side of serene heaven. Blades of grass coated in diadems of rain that carpet the lawns render royal walks poor by imitation. A burst of red maple against an inky blue sky humbled me, a soul bragging about her skill to recreate beauty in words.
I suppose I’m taking Job’s reflections to heart. I’d rather not gloss over each day and look beyond what’s there, right before me, or else fragile as is my breath one day “my eyes may never again see joy” to write. With what then will I compare the eternal joy, the ultimate wage I await?
Yet for now, as other eyes hanker to make the invisible visible, I put a tag on some moments of joy. Like on seeing the snowdrops, I paid myself $200 as my jornal.
What could have been yours?
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