I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
I bump up against it all of the time. This issue of being, our sentience, our taste, our touch, the cascade of emotions that are in constant flow... and our limited capacities as human being to cope with this constant ebb and flow. I had the privilege of seeing the vacant body of a family member recently. She looked so beautiful and peaceful. No more struggle. She was a musician and she chose three songs for her funeral. Amazing Grace, I'll Fly Away, and a composition from the Ken Burns Civil War Series called Farewell Song. It was a violin piece played by a savant. It was chillingly beautiful. I'll Fly Away was sung as a round by a chorus. It was deeply stirring for me, speaking to this human existential desire to be released from the looping, lonely pain of being.
I have spent an extraordinary amount of time in my life watching my mother and my sister cry under the excruciating weight of depression. In those times, I have wanted nothing more than to leap out of my skin and soothe them in a way that my words and love and touch could not ever quite reach them. I think that is part of why I lay my palms open at the end of my practice. I am offering everything thing that I am and all that I have and yet, somehow it really has never been enough. Not once, ever enough. All I have ever really been able to do is to know more deeply the deep-textured contours of their solitude.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
I bump up against it all of the time. This issue of being, our sentience, our taste, our touch, the cascade of emotions that are in constant flow... and our limited capacities as human being to cope with this constant ebb and flow. I had the privilege of seeing the vacant body of a family member recently. She looked so beautiful and peaceful. No more struggle. She was a musician and she chose three songs for her funeral. Amazing Grace, I'll Fly Away, and a composition from the Ken Burns Civil War Series called Farewell Song. It was a violin piece played by a savant. It was chillingly beautiful. I'll Fly Away was sung as a round by a chorus. It was deeply stirring for me, speaking to this human existential desire to be released from the looping, lonely pain of being.
I have spent an extraordinary amount of time in my life watching my mother and my sister cry under the excruciating weight of depression. In those times, I have wanted nothing more than to leap out of my skin and soothe them in a way that my words and love and touch could not ever quite reach them. I think that is part of why I lay my palms open at the end of my practice. I am offering everything thing that I am and all that I have and yet, somehow it really has never been enough. Not once, ever enough. All I have ever really been able to do is to know more deeply the deep-textured contours of their solitude.
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