“Everybody’s gonna tell you it’s not worth it,/Everybody’s gotta show you their own thing./You may try to find your way up around it,/But the need for Love is still the same…” Jackson Browne, “The Times You’ve Come”
The word dimension is slippery. It seems to mean something like “an aspect of something that it must have in order to exist.” But it also seems to mean “property” or “measure.”
Once upon a time–yesterday, to be specific–I had lunch with a special person, with whom I was once romantically involved. She was making changes in the décor of her abode, and had brought me a wire sculpture I had made while we were involved, and a vase I had done that my mother gave to her.
We had a nice, resolving chat. No regrets about having been involved, no hard feelings, and no reason not to remain friends.
Before we parted company she talked me into accepting some citrus fruit and potatoes that came from her father, whom she’d visited before we got together for lunch. Subsequently I did some shopping, and my evening meal featured a delicious baked potato. This is what it looked like just before I dug in:
All in all the day was quite therapeutic–and nourishing as well.
There’s a movie out now: Ad Astra. In Miss Maegene Nelson’s Latin class in 1968 I learned not only that “ad astra” meant “to the stars,” but that it was part of the larger phrase “per aspera ad astra,” which meant “through difficulty to the stars.” You can’t get to the stars without difficulty, nor should you. The difficulty, and your growth in overcoming it, and the knowledge you gain about what it took to get there, all define Success.
Success is not always getting to the stars. Sometimes it’s getting through a day without doing something you know you shouldn’t. Or helping someone else do so. Or earning the grudging admiration of a rival. Clocking in on time. Being the fifth caller and answering the question correctly and getting concert tickets. Putting on sunblock before golfing.
The most successful moment in my life may well have been October 6, 1971. It was that evening that I held hands with the most beautiful girl in the Universe. We had kissed before, but that was a birthday kiss. Ahead of us lay about seven years of serious involvement, and a full spectrum of happiness and sadness, of bliss and anger, of diminishing laughter and rising discontent, cycles, pendulum swings, breakups and attempted reconciliations. A thousand successes; an ultimate failure. I bear enormous guilt about that to this day, and enormous regret for what might have been.
Part of success and failure in Life is weaving a failed relationship into the tapestry of the present and the future. We are always going to school but we are not always learning. And especially in these modern, instant-communication times, we may be skeptical about what is true and what is either marketing or manipulation or “the Devil in disguise.” Success, REAL success, will come to those with an abundance of love and an absence of hatred toward any living creature.
If you must hate, and we must, for to be human is to contain a certain amount of darkness, please hate IDEAS and not the people who have and practice them. Fight tooth and nail against bad IDEAS like exploitation of the weak and indecency and destruction of the environment. Do it with optimism and determination to remain decent and cause no harm. If you fail, own your failure.
Whoops–getting preachy in here. I once got results of an aptitude test that said I might want to pursue a career as a priest. No. Not unless they change the rules. 🙂 Sorry about the sermon.
As for the image, it is my attempt to non-objectively represent Success. So there’s an array of busy, blocky triangles being aligned upward by a celestial force in the form of a sort of overarching field. I hope it’s at least a good-looking doodle.
The midnight deadline makes for Procrustean design decisions. This page suffers from ten-pounds-of-stuff-in-a-five-pound-bag syndrome. But I will work on it no more, except perhaps one day I’ll use it as the basis from a painting, minimum size 4 feet by 6 feet, so it might breathe.
embryonic relations
embattled loneliness is what we fear
mad circumstances–to be kind–austere
beset, unsettled, nettled, we set sail
receiving imput from both gal and fella
yen-tangled and amiss to cross a t
one fine day one-ll call you mon ami
now comes a kiss or clasp, behold and lo
in time a touch begets a welcome moan
creation’s more than crows and queens and drones
Tempting as it is to designate ER as “Emergency Room” and AI as “Artificial Intelligence,” for this acrostic they are the actual words “er” and “ai,” both interjectory “words to express.” “Er” expresses hesitation, and may be found in any number of the 60s-era DC Superman comics, when Clark Kent says something like, “Er, Lois, I think I left something at my desk. Go on without me.” “Ai” expresses sorrow or fear, and is used by Tolkien at the Bridge of Khazad-dûm when Legolas says, “Ai! a Balrog!”
I have a friend who had a breakup/make-up cycle so persistent he would say things like, “So anyway, after the final final FINAL breakup, there we were…” poor him and poor her.
This is a page about breaking up. Hesitation, then sorrow, then resolution: Never again. Here are its words:
Note the couple lost at sea
Even lost their Golly G
Venom laces all the tea
Ektachrome records ennui
Roaring surf could be so mean/Raging like the winds that keen
Less than an hour ago “In a relationship” became “In a domestic partnership” in my Facebook settings. Some hours earlier my partner, Denise, made a lovely blog post, about our trip to the Pinetop-Lakeside area, in which she referred to “My partner, Gary.” (Here’s a link to that post: http://aintnoninny.wordpress.com/2014/10/25/autumn-in-the-white-mountains-apache-country/ ) So we have made our partnership semi-online-official.
I liked the idea of slicing Relationship into Relation Ship. Sometimes there is a ship to steer, and for sure there will be chopwater, sandbars and squalls to navigate. Much depends on choices of battles or compromises, the rheostat setting of respect, and the prioritization. Denise and I have a long way to go. But we have come a long way together as well, and love is there.
Here are the words to the double acrostic:
Retro-fitting tastes & likes
Efforts, ventures, dips & spikes
Leaves a couple mixed to match
Applesauce with kaffeeklatsch
Tenderness & tetrazzini
Intimacy conjures djinni
Offline lovers loop the loop
Nestled in the Primal Soup
Here is another finally-finished page.
The words to the single-word double acrostic are these:
Index cards & social meme
Novice hack or reader’s dream
Voices shrill can drill to bone
Orders strict tell despot’s notion
Lavish love creates its quotient
Vortex waves have force of oceans
The meaning to this one is less elusive if you think of the words with the image as not describing a universal truth, but one person’s relationship/maturation journey, and that person someone you’re just getting to know.
One with Clay, Image and Text 