DIRECTIONS EP. 4

Directions is an initiative towards reflection, intention. Nicky is one of my biggest inspirations for investigating both peace and internal violence through suffering - he also happens to be one hell of a writer. Directions is a journal of his inspiration and insight. I hope it brings you some midweek mindfulness, and inspires you to explore as well.

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Week 4

“If all love demands imagination, all love demands withdrawal.
We must create the life creating us, and must allow that life to be — 
and to be beyond, perhaps, whatever we might imagine.
I, too, am more (and less)
than anything I imagine myself to be.
‘To know this,’ says Simone Weil, ‘is forgiveness.’”

From Parable of Perfect Silence
Christian Wiman

What is the role of discovery in routine?
What about habits puts words to our experience of the inarticulate?
Why and how you know anything at all is because you’ve searched the depths of its opposite and, with any hope (and curiosity), find tangled the very thing it was your attempt to escape. In this way, frequency has everything to do with form.
What feels human about this is the ordinariness of daily mystery, wrought in confusion and peril alike.
If you follow your skepticism the unveiling won’t change but a minor article. In this case the story of origin is no longer a threat. You’ve been treated in the same stark, simmering pool that held your more ambiguous, youthful self. And just as you’ve made it here, you will persist as fraction. Life is a matter of sustaining fragments; standing near what was intact and is finally ending. “I know it is within, because I contain it,” says Blanchfield. And in this analogy the glue is whatever story you’ve told yourself about the parts you’ve kept and those you let go. In this way certainty feels offensive. Life is made in the ritual collision of the two, “the mind and world together achieving perfect transparency one to the other (Hart).”