"Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feel that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn't. Anyhow, here he is at the bottom, and ready to be introduced to you. Winnie-the-Pooh."
A.A. Milne. Winnie-the-Pooh. London: Methuen, 1926. 1.
i wish i knew i way to communicate without bumpiness...a way to love...a way to tell the truth...
but as it is i am going headfirst down the staircase, bumbling along and trying to figure it out, getting a few bruises on the way, and sometimes bruising other people in the process.
maybe love means letting the bumpiness be.
the other day i said to a friend, "i don't want to hurt people". she said "i think, we hurt people. it's what happens." then we tried to imagine ways to be kind, honest and compassionate.
"I think it takes an amazing amount of energy to convince oneself that the Forever Person isn't just around the next corner. In the end I believe we never convince ourselves. I know that I found it increasingly hard to maintain the pose of emotional self-sufficiency lying on my bed and sitting at my desk, watching the gulls cartwheeling in the clouds over the bridges, cradling myself in my own arms, breathing warm chocolate-and-vodka breath on a rose I had found on a street corner, trying to force it to bloom.
Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like quiet tragedy."
Douglas Coupland. Life After God. London: Scribner, 2002. 48.
i'd prefer chocolate-and-port breath, but the result would be the same... roses are never harassed into bloom...and being hurt comes after the experience of acceptance and care.
one last quotation before the world of dreams arrives...
"Slowly I was learning to love my theme. Hello to journeys. Salut to escapes. I hope my journey leads me back to myself, by a new route, so that I can see my life and its possibilities as if for the first time.
And so this journey must be a sort of dying for me; a dying of the old self; a birth of something new and fearless and bright and strange."
Ben Okri. In Arcadia. London: Phoenix, 2002. 32.
