Bologna, August, 1523
When the Muse came very gently, to sit on his haunches beside her and take her hand softly in his, to tell her quietly that he would have to leave for a while, she knew not to ask whereto. She waited to control her trembling lip before asking if he could indicate how long he’d be gone: days? Years? He looked deeply into her eyes and reassured her she would be fine. She assented to this; maybe not straight away, or even before the year was out, but she would not give up on coping without him. She would do anything for him; his god hers.
D . . ., August 2019
When her lover said it wouldn’t matter if she broke his heart, for he could always weld it back together, again, or forge something laminated and nearly indestructable from it, still – to gift her something other – whatever her heart needed, she felt a tremendous grief fill her up; for it would matter tremendously if she broke his heart. How could he even think it? Sad with memory for having let herself once break in two, one half staying to craft new work, the other to sit on the precipice waiting….despite her promise to cope; she exhorted him to trust our capacity for love that could lend no reason to departure, parting, fragmentation. In love, there can only be more to ever replenish to be enough.
The world is full of gifts when you become a Lover (of God/ Life / Eachother).
I can list only a few:
Listen to a song by a singer-songwriter who reminds us that in this world full of bloodshed and egoistic maraudering, of making people starve and pissing on their picnic, there is nothing you can do but open your hands and receive what gifts there are over and above the people and their lack of generosity. Devendra Banhart, Abre Las Manos..
Read a book (to a child) from the idependent Canadian picture-book powerhouse Groundwood Books, the publisher, for example, of the adorable “The Menino” – about a newcomer who is also a mirror -, or “Sidewalk Flowers” about a Little Red Cap girl who chooses to gift silent flowers to those lost in the urban forest (rather than turning away from the cramped and critical situations a city presents). With an open heart (in childlike awe) we can better know what we need.
- Gift yourself a revelation that emerges like a butterfly from the fragile chyrsallis of one's belief in love. For example, the realisation that we transcend nothingness by our very nature of becoming more human with every attempt to be better and more in love. See Maria Popova review the poetic children’s book “Crescendo” by Paola Quintavalle (illustrator of the pregnant woman in vermillion, below, taken from her book).
The German female artist, Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), living in the Netherlands before dedicating her life to studying the full life-cycles of plants and animals, and above all the metamorphoses of insects, going off to the colonies (Suriname) - with incredible fortitude and unprecedented for a lady, but also unprecedented as a field-artist observing creatures in their natural habitat in order to best represent them; gifting us with wonderment and enhancing our love for the splendour that is nature (even when it is terribly frightening or alien as is any angel).
Not all gifts are simple to unwrap; a raw song, I’ll Be You, Be Me reminds us to help eachother learn to pray to become whole and play out our own games (in different stories, as the mantric song by Sylvia Forest posted up by the ever inspirational @alleyinspirit sings).
May we see how the lines of I and thou are blurred in love if love is not to be self-serving. We cannot give away the Higher self. We can only give our bodies away, but only to message the love as in deaf-blind sign language, speaking a language of a thirteenth sense, after all. There is nothing more painful than to reclaim these tapped upon bodies, dented as beaten copper and reclaim our holy temple for our own responsibility after each agreement to separate as one and one. “We all need eachother...” and we sometimes need to be the other…The gift of Yoga: which helps you to find space in the body for the head, or in the head for the body, gifting back and forth to yourself in preparation of your surrender to the world and its (hyper-personally) worthy others.
Go visit Angel Falls and fly like a blue bird over dancing rainbows.
