Please-Tame Me!
The fox gazed at the little prince, for a long time.
“Please–tame me!” he said.
“I want to, very much,” the prince replied. “But I have not much time. I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand.”
“One only understands the things that one tames,” said the fox. “Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends anymore. If you want a friend, tame me…”
“What must I do, to tame you?” asked the little prince.
“You must be very patient,” replied the fox. “First you will sit down at a little distance from me–like that–in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day…”- The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Words have been my source of exhaustion more than I’d like to admit, words read in the leaves of a book, spoken by me or you, by he or she. There is a key to closeness that you cannot hold in your pocket but comes only with your eyes or the proximity of your being. Is the missing word your or my?
It is the exhaustion that destroys me most. The places a soul goes to discover what other surroundings cannot bring have become so crowded, so loud. Such a place can be only lonely, and with such awareness, I sit a little further every day…
Me– the dog who bites his own stitches, the soldier preferring the medal to the trench, if only I were honest. Don’t be mistaken, don’t even be taken. I’m not clear, I’m not tame, I’m only wanting. Were you sitting a little closer you would know that.
But if I were asked what I really want, which pathology or awareness to return to sender, which experience to undo, which control to regain, it would be none of these. It would only be to finally be worth it– worth the silence, worth the words, worth a look from the center of your eye. Only in silence can contradiction make sense.
And so far this just isn’t making sense. I must have mistaken our roles, because I’m either directionally challenged, or the closer I sit every day brings me closer to far away. So maybe it should be you taming me.
The Mirage
Within two weeks even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimetre of haze just above the inked fibres of a map, that pure zone between land and chart between distances and legend between nature and storyteller. Sanford called it geomorphology. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the the sun compass and the odometer mileage and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.
- The English Patient, pg246
The Desert
The desert could not be claimed or owned–it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East. Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape. Fire and sand. We left the harbours of oasis. The places water came to and touched… Ain, Bir, Wadi, Foggara, Khottara, Shaduf. I didn’t want my name against such beautiful names. Erase the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert.
- The English Patient, p138
Andrew Stonestreet
Its fall again. I seem to have been seeing this guy every September for the last few years, and we always come away with some great photos. Last year we met up in Felton, CA, this year Andrew spent a few weeks with us here in Portland.
comma,
Certainly we talk to ourselves; there is no thinking being who has not experienced that. One could even say that the world is never a more magnificent mystery than when, within a man, it travels from his thoughts to his conscience and returns… we exclaim within ourselves, without breaking the external silence.
-Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.
Expectations
How can I expect to know God, how can I expect him to do anything for me/with me/through me if I’m not first doing what I can for myself? I’m not talking about success. I’m not talking about love. I’m not even talking about the feeling of peace. I’m talking about my part in the connection. I’m talking about character. I’m talking about work ethic, focus, and persistence to something beyond the bullshit insistence and triumphantism of happiness.
I can expect the dark and the bright times. I can expect and enjoy the repeated shock of cold water jumping into a stream. But without effort on my own part, without the willingness to step/dive/fall in, I can expect nothing in contrast from what I have now.
Laura Dart
Listen! I will be honest with you;
I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes;
These are the days that must happen to you:You shall not heap up what is call’d riches,
You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve,
You but arrive at the city to which you were destin’d—you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction, before you are call’d by an irresistible call to depart,
You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and mockings of those who remain behind you;
What beckonings of love you receive, you shall only answer with passionate kisses of parting,
You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reach’d hands toward you.- Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road
So It Goes
Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial ‘doubt.’ This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious ‘faith’ of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion.
- Thomas Merton, From New Seeds of Contemplation
Sharing hand-rolled cigarettes, Daniel and I considered the path of those who’ve walked from the realms of contemporary church culture like a salty insect shell they would find somewhat discomforting in making any attempt to return to their shoulders. Our stories include us in this demographic, and we consider the heavy weight of this world left behind, but not as though shoulders were made only for burdons or for looking back over. It is the gift of a contemplative soul to shed the conventional in its falsehoods but its burdon to recognize that the only homes to be found are those that embrace the broken. Contemplation that considers the honest shape of the shell shed and the new home will recognize the cracks and scrapes and holes of any home but will continue the mendings. Like a cigarette that just won’t stay lit, only a bit of fire will bring new life, and with it, new impending death. In such a repetition, I can hear Vonnegut’s chorus: “So it goes..”
RSS Feed
RSS by Email
2 comments