Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Writing Affirmations


Tell yourself you’re doing it for humanity. Teeming, varied, rushing life. What binds us here in this place? What makes us pass each other in the street and pause, looking into another’s face to notice: I see you. I understand. Something like that happened to me. I felt like that once.
 
We don’t always get it right. Sometimes the right word, the right phrase, slips through our grasp, bobbing and submerging into the green stew. We try. We describe its slippery surface, the feel of it. We gaze into the murky depths, looking for clues, for context.
 
Testimony: evidence or proof provided by the existence or appearance of something.
 
It’s important, what you do. Never lose sight of that. That a-ha moment, empathy, recognition—these are the best parts of humanity. It’s wonderful to be loved but oh, to be understood.
 
Keep at it, scribes. What you do is important. Not everyone has the patience to stop and look, to try to articulate what it means to be here, right now. Pen to paper, fingers on keyboard, keep gazing towards the horizon, continue excavating memory, and feeling, and hope. Spill it out, profess, recite. What you do is important and so necessary.  

2 comments:

  1. Your piece reminds me of Buckminster Fuller, who once heard an inner voice that declared:

    From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you for sharing that. "You do not have the right to eliminate yourself," as if suppressing the urge to express is against life itself. Love that.

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"As soon as we express something, we devalue it strangely. We believe ourselves to have dived down into the depths of the abyss, and when we once again reach the surface, the drops of water on our pale fingertips no longer resemble the ocean from which they came...Nevertheless, the treasure shimmers in the darkness unchanged." ---Franz Kafka